exerted, and making use of these he devises a constant unit of value, or least common denominator, mathematically related to these limits.[1] He then works back toward a precise characterization of any obstacles, with a view to their removal, and later to logical prediction of advantageous products.
Bondage is as concrete as anything there is, and has been described at great length with much gusto and explicit detail. Freedom would be a pure abstraction if it were not for its measurable limits which are not nearly as remote as they may appear, since they are the normal effort of population toward complete emancipation, within a definite political area, and the duration of that normal effort, which is measured by time.
If we can brush away old misconceptions, and realize that in using the term value, as we do, we are now committed to a concrete absurdity; and if we realize further that the formal tokens of value, which we call money, have always, even in the days of Cæsar, been generally honored tokens of our freedom to move and choose, however vitiated at times by the various arbitrary mandates which we have struggled to eliminate, then we should be able to comprehend that in an area of self-imposed order freedom and economic value are one and the same thing.
Guided by this conception of the necessity of determining total economic value, or human freedom, in terms of its ulti-
- ↑ In the unfinished fragment of his “Principles of Economics” (page 169) Jevons quotes Sir W. Petty, who, in 1662, came very near to a conception of this. At the outset he is so close to the engineer’s conception of measurement, and at the conclusion is so far from it, that he is worth quoting in full: “All things ought to be valued by two natural denominations, which is land and labour; that is, we ought to say, a ship or garment is worth such a measure of land with such another measure of labor; forasmuch as both ships and garments were the creations of lands and men’s labors thereupon” (so far this is a well-stated recognition of two dimensions of value). “This being true, we should be glad to find out a natural Par between Land and Labour, so as we might express the value of either of them alone as well or better than by both, and reduce one into the other as easily and certainly as we reduce pence into pounds.” Here again is the old yearning for an impossible one-dimension value that has stultified economics. If an engineer were to say that pressure and area were the denominators of static value and that we should endeavor to find out a natural parity between pounds and square inches we would regard it as pathetic. A least common denominator is never quite as simple as the schoolboy thinks it should be.
