PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 563 
who has it not; so that to that extent it must always tend to go and to stay 
where it is most significant. But then exchangeable things are never really the 
ultimately significant things at all. They are means. The ends, which are 
always subjective experiences of some kind, whether of the senses or the will 
or the emotions, are not in any direct way exchangeable; and there is no 
machinery to secure that increments and decrements of exchangeable things 
shall in industrial equilibrium take the same place and have the same differential 
significance on the scales of any two men when measured not in terms of 
other means, but in terms of ends. If two men habitually spend a portion of 
their resources on food and on books, there is a presumption that to both of 
them the differential significance of a shilling’s-worth of food and of a volume 
of Everyman’s or the Home University Library is equivalent. But there is 
no presumption whatever that the vital significance of either one or the other is 
identical to the two men as measured, not each in terms of the other, but each 
in the degree to which it ministers to the ultimate purposes of its possessor or 
consumer ; in the pain that its absence or the pleasure that its presence would 
give him; or in its ultimate significance upon his life. Granted that « makes 
just as much difference, both to you and to me, as y does, it does not follow that 
either x or y makes the same difference to you that it does to me. 
Our next step will reveal some of the bearings of this distinction; for we 
are now to consider ‘distribution’ in its technical sense of the principle of 
sharing of a commercial product amongst the factors of production. Now a 
commercial product is something exchangeable, and what is actually shared 
amongst the factors is not the product itself, but the command of exchangeable 
things in general that it secures in the market. We are therefore now engaged 
upon a strictly economic problem, whereas we have hitherto been dealing with 
the wider problem of distribution of resources in general, whether material or 
immaterial, economic or non-economic; and it is instructive to note that we skall 
not have to introduce any new principle or formulate any new law whatever 
when we pass on to the specifically economic problem. For economics have no 
laws of their own, though they furnish a vaguely defined but clearly characterised 
field for the application of certain general laws. 
Before illustrating this truth by applying the general law of distribution 
to the special problem of economic or industrial distribution, let us attempt 
to determine more closely the characteristic of the economic field of investiga- 
tion itself. Naturally there is no sharp line that marks off the economic life, 
and we must not expect to find a rigid definition of it; but I take it that if 1 
am doing a thing because I want it done for its own sake (not necessarily my 
own sake, in any restricted sense, for it may primarily concern someone else in 
whom I am interested out of pure good will) or am making a thing that I require 
for the supply of my own desires or the accomplishment of my own purposes; if, 
in fact, I am engaged in the direct pursuit of my own purposes, or expression 
of my own impulses, my action is not economic. But if I am making or doing 
anything not because I have any direct interest in it, but because someone else 
wants it, and that other person will either do what I want done or put me in 
command of it, then I am furthering his purposes as a means of furthering my 
own. I am indirectly forwarding my purposes by directly forwarding his. 
This is the nature of the economic relation, and the mechanism or articulation 
of the whole complex of such economic relations is the proper subject of economic 
investigation. Thus, if a peasant adorns his ox-yoke with carving because he 
likes doing it and likes it when done, or if he carves a stool for his friend 
because he loves him and likes doing it for him and believes he will like it when 
done, the action is not economic; but if he gets a reputation for carving and 
other peasants want his work, he may become a professional carver and may 
carve a yoke or a stool because other people want them and he finds that supply- 
ing their wants is the easiest way for him to get food and clothes and leisure 
for his own art, and all things else that he desires. His artistic work now puts 
him into an economic relation with his fellows; but this example serves to 
remind us that there may be an indefinite area of coincidence between the 
economic and non-economic aspects of a man’s occupations and relations. That 
man is happy indeed who finds that in expressing some part of his nature he is 
providing for all his nature’s wants, or that in rendering services to friends in 
which he delights.he is putting himself in command of all the services he him- 
Onore 
