Financial Legislation and its Limitations. 8i 



as when he wrote it. But in vulgar appreciation such a phrase 

 becomes first a by-word and then a superstition. Recently, in 

 the United States, the popular fetich has embraced silver, and it 

 has been firmly believed that a bushel of wheat ought always to 

 be worth a silver dollar, doubtless with crude implication that 

 they both cost or were worth the same amount of labor. 



A similar difficulty is experienced in attempting to compare 

 the returns of the soil in different places and times: returns to 

 what? Naturally, to equal outlays. But to find a measure of 

 equal outlays is almost impossible. "'^ 



Finally, the doctrine of imputation has pointed to a more 

 satisfactory solution. It has gradually, but dimly, been perceived 

 that justice, humanly considered, consists in allowing men to 

 work out their own destiny. If the contracting parties freely 

 agree to impute satisfactoriness and finality to their arrangement, 

 they should be held to abide by the same. 



In theory, it is easy to conceive circumstances under which 

 the parties can be held to have made this imputation. If they 

 will give just so much of one commodity (it might be money) 

 for just so much of another, that is proof that, for the pwrposes 

 of the trade, they are satisfied to treat each part of each stock 

 as equal to every other part of the same stock, and thus also as 

 equal to the exertion of sacrifice involved in bringing forth the 

 stock and all its equal parts; and further, that they regard 

 aliquot parts of the two stocks exchanged as equal. Certainty 

 is arrived at in the matter by seeking exactly how much of one 

 stock the owner is finally willing to surrender for a given quantity 

 of the other, under all the circumstances of want and provision 

 for want, including exertions, sacrifices, labor, alternative oppor- 

 tunities, and whatever may enter into his feelings or calculations. 

 Thus ample scope is given for the motives arising from the labor 

 involved, without the necessity of stopping to consider whether 

 one man's labor is abstractly equal to that of another, by the 

 simple expedient of accepting the imputation which the parties 

 have made in their contract of sale or exchange — that, for eco- 



•» Cf. Marshall, Principles, fifth ed., bk. IV, ch. Ill, § 8. 



