And what shall we say of "inevitable economic tendencies"? A good many of them--leading in diverse directions--have appeared in the literature of economics. On the one hand, inevitable tendencies towards a divine "economic harmony." On the other hand, inevitable tendencies toward monopoly; toward ever more numerous panics; toward greater concentration of wealth; toward proletarian misery of an ever more hopeless sort--all bringing us finally to a socialistic state. I see no inevitable economic tendencies anywhere. The "economic motive," as already indicated, if left free to work in vacuo, would lead us to anarchy. But it doesn't work _in vacuo_. And the question as to where the infinite complex of social forces may lead us is not one that can be settled "_reinwirtschaftlich_." We can only say that economic values, at a given moment, are the focal points at which the laws and moral values and loves and hates, and "utilities" and "costs" directly connected with economic goods, and the multitudinous other values of concrete social life exert their motivating influence on the economic activities of society. Then, given these economic values, and assuming that they alone are of significance for the activity of society, we may see where they would lead us. But we should still be in a world of abstractions if we did so. For the economic social values do not exhaust the social forces of motivation. Very much of social activity is non-economic in character. And the force of a given moral value--say that of elevating the condition of a degraded class--may be divided, tending indirectly by raising the value of a certain sort of economic good, to encourage its production, and tending directly to prevent its production. Let us assume, for example, that this moral value leads to an increase in the income of the degraded class, and so tends to increase the demand for liquor; but assume, further, that this same moral value is the force leading to a prohibition law, that forbids the production and sale of liquor. Ethical, religious, legal, esthetic, and other values may indirectly motivate the economic activity of men through entering into economic values, or they may directly, in their own form, antagonize these economic values, by constraining those who do not "participate" in them, and by impelling those who do feel them to activities in lines other than those where the greatest surplus of economic value is to be gained. Even, then, though we have a theory of economic value which includes these other social forces, we have no right to speak of "inevitable economic tendencies." Social life is one organic whole. There is no phase of social activity which is wholly directed by one set of values, and there is no one set of values that exclusively depends on one sort of motive. And when we give exclusive attention, in our study, to one set of values, as it is often necessary to do, we must recognize that we are handling an