ly as may be.
At the outset I am obliged to take exception to the very first stone that Rodbertus lays in the structure of his system—the proposition that all goods, economically considered, are products of labour and of labour alone.
First of all, what do the words "economically considered" mean? Rodbertus explains them by a contrast. He puts the economical standpoint in opposition to the physical standpoint. That goods, physically speaking, are the products not only of labour but of natural powers, he explicitly allows. If then it is said that, from the economic standpoint, goods are the product of labour only, the statement can surely have but one meaning, viz. that the co-operation of natural powers in production is a matter of utter indifference so far as human economy is concerned. On one occasion Rodbertus gives forcible expression to this conception when he says: "All other goods except those that have cost labour, however useful or necessary they may be to mankind, are natural goods, and have no place in economic consideration." "Man may be thankful for what nature has done beforehand in the case of economic goods, as it has spared him so much extra labour, but economy takes notice of them only in so far as labour has completed the work of nature."*38
Now this is simply false. Even purely natural goods have a place in economic consideration, provided only they are scarce as compared with the need for them. If a lump of solid gold in the shape of a meteoric stone falls on a man's field, is it not to be economically considered? Or if a silver mine is discovered by chance on his estate, is the silver not to be economically considered? Will the owner of the field really pay no attention to the gold and silver given him by nature, or give them away, or waste them, simply because they were bestowed on him by nature without exertion on his part? Will he not preserve them just as carefully as he would gold and silver that he had earned by the labour of his hands; place them in security from the greed of others; cautiously convert them into money in the market—in short, treat them economically? And again, is it true that economy has regard to those goods which have cost labour only in so far as labour has completed the work of nature? If that were the case, men acting economically would have to put a cask of the most exquisite Rhine wine on the same level with a cask of well-made but naturally inferior country wine, for human labour has done pretty much the same for both. That, notwithstanding this, the Rhine wine is often valued economically at ten times the amount of the other, is a striking confutation of Rodbertus's theorem at the hands of everyday experience.
All this is so obvious that we might fairly expect Rodbertus to have taken every precaution to guard this, his first and most important fundamental proposition, against such objections. In this expectation, however, we are disappointed. With peculiar carelessness he is content on almost every occasion to assert this proposition in the tone of an axiom. Sometimes he appeals on its behalf to the authority of Adam Smith and Ricardo, and only on one single occasion does he say anything that might be construed as an attempt to give it any real foundation.
The critic will scarcely be satisfied with such poor support for a proposition so important. As regards the authorities appealed to, in a scientific discussion authorities in themselves prove nothing. Their strength is simply the strength of the arguments which they represent. But we shall shortly have an opportunity of convincing ourselves that Adam Smith and Ricardo merely assert the proposition as an axiom without giving any kind of argument for it. Moreover, as Knies has on a recent occasion very properly pointed out,*39 Adam Smith and Ricardo themselves have not held consistently to it.
In the one seriously argued passage Rodbertus says: "Every product that comes to us through labour in the shape of a good is, economically speaking, to be placed to the credit of human labour alone, because labour is the only o