with ardor the horrors of a bargain sale.  In any case the fine calculations I have imagined convey a fantastic picture of her state of mind.  And how much more fantastic, the critic may continue, of the state of mind in which things of a different kind are bought by less careful people.  When, for instance, one of us happy-go-lucky males (more liberally supplied, perhaps, than the housewife with the necessary cash), decides to buy a motor bicycle, or to replenish his stock of collars or ties, does the above analysis bear any resemblance to the actual facts?  In the case of the motor bicycle, the purchaser may, indeed, weigh the price fairly carefully against the pleasure and benefit, though contrariwise he may be a rich enough gentleman hardly to bother about this.  But, one motor bicycle is as much as he is at all likely to buy, and what becomes, then, of the distinction between total and marginal utility?  In the case of the ties and collars, the vagueness of many of us about the price will be extreme.  We probably have been uneasily conscious for some time of an inconvenient shortage of these troublesome articles and eventually will go off (or perhaps will be sent off with ignominy) to the nearest suitable shop to make good the deficiency.  How can we speak here with a straight face of the relation between marginal utility and price?

These are very pertinent criticisms; but they do not make nearly as much nonsense of the notion of marginal utility as may seem at first.  The last point, indeed, serves rather to give it a fresh aspect of much significance.  Those of us who do not bother about the price we pay for our ties and collars owe a debt of gratitude, of which we are insufficiently conscious, to the more careful people who do; as well as to the custom which prevails in shops in Western countries (as distinct from the bazaars of the East) of charging as a rule a uniform price to all customers.  If we were the only people who bought these things, an enterprising salesman would be able to charge us very much what he chose.  He could put up his price, and we would hardly be aware of it.  And, as by lowering his price he could not tempt us to buy any more, price reductions would be few and far between.  But fortunately there are always some people who do know what the price is, even when they are buying collars and ties; and who will adjust the amount they buy in accordance with the price.  It is these worthy people who make the laws of demand work out as we well know they do.  It is they who will curtail their consumption if the price has fallen and it is they who constitute the seller’s problem, and help to keep down prices for the rest of us.  The rest of us—­it is well to be quite blunt about it—­simply do not count in this connection.  We have no cause then to plume ourselves that we have disproved the truth of economic laws when we declare that we seldom weigh the utility of anything against its price.  All that this shows is that our actions