MENTAL ENERGY. 637 



tariffs due to selfishness and stupidity; and the contest of labor and 

 capital due to the errors of the ignorant workman and the ignorant 

 capitalist alike. All interests are harmonious. The evolution of 

 science and invention will surely bring them together on the lines of 

 righteousness, peace and material abundance. 



This essay has been condensed from a lecture prepared and given 

 before a Clergymen's Club some months ago. In it I tried to show the 

 necessary connection of religion and life as developed by economic 

 study, the law of mutual service being the rule by which commerce lives 

 and moves and has its being. This lecture has since been read to sev- 

 eral clubs of very different types of men, and from the great interest 

 excited I am led to think there is something in it fit for the student of 

 facts and figures to say. 



I may, therefore, venture to repeat the statement of two principles 

 which are presented in this treatise, which I think have been seldom 

 if ever fully developed in any of the standard works upon political 

 economy. To my own mind these are basic principles which when 

 applied may profoundly modify many of the concepts of students of 

 economic science. I join in the view that the family is the unit of so- 

 ciety, the home the center. The end of all production is consumption. 

 Nothing is constant but change, and there is no such thing as fixed 

 material capital of any long duration in the progress of time. The two 

 principles which I have endeavored to enforce are as follows: 



First. The cost of each person or head of the family is what he and 

 his immediate dependents consume. His income, whether measured in 

 terms of money or in products, is, therefore, no measure of his cost; what 

 he distributes in payment for service rendered being expended by those 

 who receive it in procuring the commodities which constitute their 

 cost to the community. 



Second. No person who is occupied or is in the employment or ser- 

 vice of others is paid for what he does. His work may occupy long 

 hours and may be applied to arduous manual labor, or it may be done in 

 a short number of hours per day, with but little physical effort. Neither 

 the hours nor the effort constitute any measure on which payment can 

 be based. The measure of payment is fixed by the measure of the work 

 saved to him who makes the payment, consciously or unconsciously 

 estimated. 



These two precepts or principles, coupled with the theory that there 

 is no conceivable limit to the power of mind over matter, or to the 

 number of transformations of physical energy to which direction may be 

 given in the material support of humanity, bring the visions of the 

 Utopians within the scope of a law of progress in material welfare to 

 which no limit can be put in time or space. 



