PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION G. 455 



12. Mere raising nominal wages all round cannot possibly 

 benefit the worker unless accompanied by more than a corre- 

 sponding increase in the volume of consumable wealth produced. 



13. Illustration showing the effect upon the " purchasing 

 power " of consumers of commodities, generally, in cases where the 

 arbitrary raising of nominal wages is restricted to a particular 

 class or trade. 



14. Concluding remarks, followed by a tabular illustration of 

 the remarkable permanency of the "value-orbits" of different 

 commodities in relation to their common standard gold, and also 

 to each other. 



15. Reasons supporting the view that cost of production — not 

 demaad and supply — is the primary law which determines and 

 regulates economic prices or values; and that this law can alone 

 account for the remarkable permanence of the ratios of equivalent 

 exchange weights of the principal commodities in relation to the 

 standard gold, and to each other. 



Introductory. 



Perhaps there is no other field of inquiry which has suffered 

 so much from the lack of uniformity, precision, and proper classi- 

 fication and definition of terms as that branch of art or science 

 which relates to social economics. These imperfections were 

 perhaps unavoidable in the early stages of investigation of matters 

 so complex and variables and may have been perpetuated by the 

 idea that the popular appreciation of important social and economic 

 questions might be aided by the retention of words in common 

 use. 



The terms capital, utility, wealth, value, price, rent, profit, 

 wages-fund, wages, labour, productive •agencies, are of this class, 

 and are still frequently a source of confusion, because of the very 

 different meanings which different writers and speakers loosely 

 attach to them. 



In a single address it would be altogether impossible to ent-^r 

 fully into the many causes of confusion, due to the lack of a 

 systematic classification, and to a more complete definition of the 

 more important generic and specific economic terms now in common 

 use in discussions and in treatises, dealing with root matters in 

 existing social and economic problems. I have therefore found it 

 necessary to limit my observations to such terms as have an 

 immediate and important bearing upon the various questions 

 touching the human agencies and their instrumental auxiliaries 

 engaged in the current or annual production of consumable wealth 

 necessary to supply the desired standard essentials of living, 

 viz. : — 



(1) Wants essential to life itself. 



(2) Wants essential to comfort. 



(3) Luxurious wants. 



