less important and far more difficult; but there is nothing to
correspond to the Supreme Allied Council. There we rely upon a
co-operation which, as was stressed in Chapter I, is unco-ordinated.
That co-operation has been evolved by the mutual competition
of innumerable business concerns, controlled by men largely
animated by the motive of pecuniary profit. But it has not
been evolved wholly by such means: and how far that competition or
that motive of profit is essential to its efficiency are questions
with which this volume has not been in any way concerned. The economic
laws, the relations between utility, and price and cost, with which it
has been occupied, are an entirely different matter; and these _are_
essential to the efficiency of any system of society. For if the
marginal utility of a commodity is equal to its marginal cost, and if
this marginal cost is composed of payments to the various agents of
production at least as great as they could have obtained if they had
been used otherwise, this amounts to saying that the agents of
production are so utilized as to yield the maximum utility; and this
is the same thing as saying that they are so utilized as to produce
the maximum wealth.

Sec.3. _Utility and Wealth_. Upon this last point it is important to be
quite clear. An increase in wealth seems a solid, tangible reality;
something, which, however much we may scorn it in our more precious
moods, we recognize, for a rather poor community, to be an important
object of endeavor. But an increase in utility seems a vague,
impalpable notion, hardly deserving the same practical concern. None
the less the two things are identical. We greatly deceive ourselves if
we suppose wealth to be an objective reality. It is true that, when
we get behind the money in which it is measured, we come upon
commodities, like food and clothes and houses and factories, which
seem comfortably solid and objective things; but we also come upon
many services, like those of gardeners and doctors and hospital
nurses, which we are bound to reckon as part of our wealth, although
they are not embodied in any tangible commodities. Moreover, although
material commodities are objective realities in themselves, and in
many of their properties, they are _not_ objective realities in their
property as wealth. A pair of boots is an objective fact; so is the
number of pairs in existence at any time, so is their size, their
weight, the quantity of leathe