TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 655 
guarantee of the identity of the interests of the present and of the future and of 
those of the individual trader and of the comuiunity is a failing common to Free 
Trade and Jaisser faire. 
Competition between individuals has, no doubt, been employed as a working 
hypothesis in economic theory from the days when Hconomics, as a science 
distinct from an art, originated with Adam Smith, and is still the assumption 
with which economists commence their reasoning; and so far Free Trade may 
with some excuse be described as ‘the economist’s policy.’ But the convenience 
of a theory does not prove the correspondence to fact of the assumption on which 
it rests; nor does the useful theoretical hypothesis of competition between 
individuals exchanging their commodities demonstrate the practical expediency 
of a fiscal policy of Free Trade. 
The prominence given to marginal factors has been a conspicuous feature of 
recent economics. It has scarcely been brought into very explicit relation with 
the theories of international trade and value. The use made of final or marginal 
utility by writers like Jevons and Dr. Cannan has concealed the gap between the 
interests of the present and those of the future in very much the same as it has 
been hidden in the common argument based on the necessary equivalence of 
imports and exports. But the whole conception of marginal factors as deter- 
mining influences rests on the assumption of individual competition, while the 
section devoted in economic treatises to monopoly grows in bulk, and the place 
occupied by combinations in business practice becomes more prominent. The 
influence of monopoly on international trade has been recognised, but the more 
recent development of a formal theory of monopoly has been brought into no more 
explicit relations with this department of theory than those which at present attend 
the conception of the governing importance of marginal factors. Indeed, the general 
reconstruction of economic theory required by the substitution of monopolies or 
combinations for individual competition has not been fairly faced. Yet it is not 
easy to bring into accord with these new developments the determining influence 
of marginal factors. For combinations act by mass and not by separate parts, and 
are the negation of those infinitesimal additions and deductions which are sug- 
gested and implied in the conception of a margin. With the notion of individual 
competition, in general use as the primary assumption of economic theory, the 
theoretical argument for Free Trade has, on the other hand, been associated. Yet 
the power of Trusts testifies to the present influence of combination in this depart- 
ment of business practice, and some curious consequences follow from the new 
position taken by monopoly in theory and fact alike. 
MONDAY, AUGUST 22. 
The following Papers and Report were read :— 
1. Lhe Economic Importance of the Family. 
By Mrs. Bosanquer. 
There are two points of view from which we may consider the economic 
function of the family; first, in relation to the supply and maintenance of an 
effective population; secondly, in relation to the particular industrial organisation 
of a given time and place. 
From the latter point of view the function, perhaps even the importance, of 
the family group is apt to vary. Compare Le Play's description of the Famille 
Souche and.other phases of organisation, where the fumily is the unit of produc- 
tion, and is held together by the industrial dependence of the different members 
upon each other, with the system under which each member of the family finds 
and carries on his work independently of the others. Both phases still exist, but 
the latter tends increasingly to preponderate; and it is probably this tendency 
