from their high perch and place their "ideal" wares on a level with the grossest material things. Allured by the bait of making a point against Marx, they insist that high works of art embodying noble "ideas" are just as much "goods," "wares and merchandise" to be trafficked in as anything else, that comes down the pike in "due course of trade." The willingness of these gentlemen to do so does not, however, make commodities of the works of genius, any more than their hypocritical phrases change the course of human progress. While the economic conditions of capitalist society reflect on the whole range of its ideas, creating there all sorts of distorted and shapeless beings, nobody is crazy enough to seriously apply the yardstick to these matters. While an "art journal" may sometimes quote a price of a great work of art because it "fetched" that much at a sale, no "dealer" even will dare say that the Sistine Madonna is equal in value to so many steam engines, or that a certain Raphael or Rubens has risen in value since J. P. Morgan became an art Mäcenas, thus augmenting the "demand." It is true that the excesses of capitalism have tainted everything with a mercenary spirit, and have made art the subject of traffic, but this no more makes "wares" out of art-subjects than the traffic in white slaves turns love and affection into merchandise. Nor has the purchase-money paid for them any more to do with the economic categories of price and value than that paid to the harlot in compensation for her venal favors.
A different situation is presented in the case of commodities which are the result of so-called skilled or higher classes of labor. Masaryk thinks it a complete refutation of the labor theory of value that one man's labor does not produce in the same space of time as much value as that of any other man's. And Böhm-Bawerk considers it awful theoretical jugglery for Marx to say: "Skilled labor counts only as simple labor intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labor, a given quantity of skilled labor being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labor. Experience shows that this
