426 AGRICULTURAL ECONOMICS 



and as its price sinks toward zero the demand for it loses its elasticity. 

 Nearly the same may be said of salt. Its price in England is so low 

 that the demand for it as an article of food is very inelastic; but in 

 India the price is comparatively high and the demand is comparatively 

 elastic. 



The demand for things of a higher quality depends much on sen- 

 sibility: some people care little for a refined flavour in their wine 

 provided they can get plenty of it; others crave a high quality, but 

 are easily satiated. In the ordinary working class districts the 

 inferior and the better joints are sold at nearly the same price, but 

 some well-paid artisans in the north of England have developed a 

 liking for the best meat, and will pay for it nearly as high a price as 

 can be got in the west end of London, where the price is kept arti- 

 ficially high by the necessity of sending the inferior joints away for 

 sale elsewhere. Use also gives rise to acquired distastes as well as 

 to acquired tastes. Illustrations which make a book attractive to 

 many readers will repel those whose familiarity with better work has 

 rendered them fastidious. A person of high musical sensibility ir, a 

 large town will avoid bad concerts, though he might go to them 

 gladly if he lived in a small town, where no good concerts are to be 

 heard, because there are not enough persons willing to pay the high 

 price required to cover their expenses. The effective demand for 

 first-rate music is elastic only in large towns; for second-rate music 

 it is elastic in both large and small towns. 



Generally speaking, those things have the most elastic demand 

 which are capable of being applied to many different uses. Water, 

 for instance, is needed, first as food, then for cooking, then for washing 

 of various kinds, and so on. When there is no special drought, but 

 water is sold by the pailful, the price may be low enough to enable 

 even the poorer classes to drink as much of it as they are inclined, 

 while for cooking they sometimes use the same water twice over, and 

 they apply it very scantily in washing. The middle classes will per- 

 haps not use any of it twice for cooking; but they will make a pail 

 of water go a good deal farther for washing purposes than if they had 

 an unlimited supply at command. When water is supplied by pipes, 

 and charged at a very low rate by meter, many people use as much 

 of it even for washing as they feel at all inclined to do; and when the 

 water is supplied not by meter but at a fixed annual charge, and is 

 laid on in every place where it is wanted, the use of it for every pur- 

 pose is carried to the full satiety limit. 



