Much of his attack might have taken the form of entirely sound but friendly criticism. Great play is made with a sentence of Ricardo’s:[53] “Utility is not the measure of exchangeable value, though it is absolutely essential to it.” This non-committal sentence does not carry us very far, and does not claim to be a definition, but is true as far as it goes. Ruskin makes hay of Ricardo’s statement next following, that Labour was, in primitive abstraction at any rate, the sole regulator of price. Neither he nor Ruskin had reached the modern theory of “marginal values” which solves so many ancient puzzles and misunderstandings. Price is fixed where Demand and Supply meet: and it measures two things. It represents on one side the value in use of the last article produced; and on the other the cost in labour of the production thereof. Then both sides are satisfied--the buyer and the seller. But the price does not represent the utility of the earliest articles produced--the first loaves of bread would be quite priceless,--nor the cost of the production of the first few easily grown crops. Both values are “final” or “marginal.” This simple and permanent plan of determining price, which nobody can or should alter, is, put shortly, the terrible law of supply and demand, the very heart of economic theory, about which so much indignation is wastefully expended. If Ruskin’s penetrating mind had been devoted to helpful criticism of the gaps left by the economists, they might have reached this theory much earlier. But Ruskin wrote in a state of noble rage--a bad state for the scientific temper. “Nothing in history,” he wrote, “has ever been so disgraceful to human intellect as the acceptance among us of the common doctrines of political economy as a science.”[54] This was chiefly because it was said to be a systematic disobedience to the first principles of its professed religion, because it taught “the love of money” and “mammon service”; it was “a science of becoming rich.” Once accept so terrible a misconception, and all the vials of the prophets’ wrath are not too profuse. “To this science and to this alone (the professed and organized pursuit of money) is owing all the evil of modern days. I say all.”[55] Ruskin wrote in 1865 a letter to the _Daily Telegraph_ in which he says people cannot get servants by political economy and the law of supply and demand--as though he had said they cannot be got by physics and the law of gravitation. To see his real attitude we must add a phrase of 1883: “While I admit there is such a thing as mercantile economy, distinguished from social, I have always said that neither Mill, Fawcett nor Bastiat knew the contemptible science they professed to teach.”[56] This attitude is pure disaster, comparable to the great _odia theologica_ which have cursed the world. It is not necessary nor wise to take sides in an utterly baseless controversy. Let us rather examine the programme of the science.