PRINCIPLES OF VALUE AND PRICE 417 



with anything which serves some of his purposes, to obtain a thing 

 which serves none of them. But, secondly, the thing must not only 

 have some utility, there must also be some difficulty in its attainment. 

 The utility of a thing in the estimation of the purchaser is the 

 extreme limit of its exchange value: higher the value cannot ascend; 

 peculiar circumstances are required to raise it so high. This topic is 

 happily illustrated by Mr. De Quincey. 



Walk into almost any possible shop, buy the first article you see; what 

 will determine its price ? In the ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, simply 

 the element D difficulty of attainment. The element U, or intrinsic 

 utility, will be perfectly inoperative. Let the thing (measured by its uses) 

 be, for your purposes, worth ten guineas, so that you would rather give 

 ten guineas than lose it; yet if the difficulty of producing it be only worth 

 one guinea, one guinea is the price which it will bear. But still, not the less, 

 though U is inoperative, can U be supposed absent ? By no possibility; 

 for, if it had been absent, assuredly you would not have bought the article 

 even at the lowest price. U acts upon you, though it does not act upon 

 the price. 



The difficulty of attainment which determines value is not always 

 the same kind of difficulty. It sometimes consists in an absolute 

 limitation of the supply. There are things of which it is physically 

 impossible to increase the quantity beyond certain narrow limits. 

 Such are those wines which can be grown only in peculiar circum- 

 stances of soil, climate, and exposure. Such also are ancient sculp- 

 tures; pictures by the old masters; rare books or coins, or other 

 articles of antiquarian curiosity. 



But there is another category (embracing the majority of all 

 things that are bought and sold) in which the obstacle to attainment 

 consists only in the labour and expense requisite to produce the 

 commodity. Without a certain labour and expense it cannot be had: 

 but when anyone is willing to incur these, there needs be no limit to 

 the multiplication of the product. If there were labourers enough 

 and machinery enough, cotton, woolens, or linens might be produced 

 by thousands of yards for every single yard now manufactured. 



There is a third case, intermediate between the two preceding, 

 and rather more complex, which I shall at present merely indicate, 

 but the importance of which in political economy is extremely great. 

 There are commodities which can be multiplied to an indefinite extent 

 by labour and expenditure, but not by a fixed amount of labour and 

 expenditure. Only a limited quantity can be produced at a given 



