Without taking into account this life of the individual in the institution we can never do justice to the general sway of the market, as a historical organism, over society at large. It is, as I have suggested, a structure as imposing as the political state itself, filling the eye with the spectacle of established and unquestioned power and impressing its estimates upon every mind. We have to recognize, then, not merely that pecuniary value is, in general, a social value which derives from the social development of the past, but that it is the outcome, more particularly, of a special phase of that development, namely, the comparatively recent growth of industry and business, including also the growth of consumption. This is the special institution from which, for better or worse, the pecuniary values of to-day draw their character, very much as ecclesiastical values draw theirs from the history of the church. The phenomena of any institution are moulded in part by the general conditions of the time, but they are moulded especially by their particular institutional antecedents, which may be somewhat incongruous with the more general conditions. If you attend a service of the Established Church you become aware of points of view which may seem to you, as a man of to-day, absurd and incomprehensible, except as you know something of their history. The same may very well be true in the pecuniary world, though we may not notice it because we are more used to it, because we are ourselves members of this church. And the method of criticism, in the market as in the church, is to take as large a view of the institution as possible, discover in what respects it is failing to function adequately in the general life, and strive to bring about such changes as seem to be required. It seems probable that the more we consider, in the light of an organic view of society, the practice of discussing values apart from their institutional antecedents, the more sterile, except for somewhat narrowly technical purposes, this practice will appear. Certainly it should have but a secondary place in inquiries which seek to throw light upon ethics or social policy. It is, for example, but a frail basis for a theory of distribution. The latter I take to be essentially a historical and institutional phenomenon, economic technique being for the most part only a mechanism through which social organization expresses itself. I do not question the technical value of the current treatises on distribution which more or less cut it off from its roots in the social whole, but perhaps the time is coming for a treatment which takes technical economics for granted and elucidates the larger actualities of the question.