FOOTNOTES:
[39] To this letter Professor Hodgson replied by one printed in the Scotsman of November 14.
[From "The Scotsman," November 18, 1873]
MR. RUSKIN AND PROFESSOR HODGSON.
Oxford, November 15, 1873.
To the Editor of "The Scotsman."
Sir: For Professor Hodgson's "undue encroachments on your space and his own time," I leave you to answer to your readers, and the Professor to console his class. To his criticisms on my language and temper I bow, their defence being irrelevant to the matter in hand. Of his harmless confusion of the word "correlative" with the word "consequent" I take no notice; and his promise of a sifting examination of my economic teaching I anticipate with grateful awe.[40]
But there is one sentence in his letter of real significance, and to that alone I reply. The Professor ventured (he says) to suggest that possibly I with others "believe that economists confused existing demand with wise and beneficial demand, and existing supply with wise and beneficial supply."
I do believe this. I have written all my books on political economy in such belief. And the entire gist of them is the assertion that a real law of relation holds between the non-existent wise demand and the non-existent beneficial supply, but that no real law of relation holds between the existent foolish demand and the existent mischievous supply.
That is to say (to follow Professor Hodgson with greater accuracy into his lunar illustrations), if you ask for the moon, it does not follow that you will get it; nor is your satisfaction more secure if you ask for sixpence from a Poor-Law guardian; but if you limit your demand to an honest penny, and endeavor to turn it by honest work, the divine law of supply will, in the plurality of cases, answer that rational and therefore divine demand.
Now, Professor Hodgson's statement, as reported in your columns, was that "demand regulates supply." If his assertion, in his lecture, was the qualified one, or that "wise demand regulates beneficial supply," your reporter is much to be blamed, the Professor's class profoundly to be congratulated, and this correspondence is at an end; while I look forward with deepest interest to the necessary elucidations by the Professor of the nature of wisdom and benefit; neither of these ideas having been yet familiar ones in common economical treatises. But I wrote under the impression that the Professor dealt hitherto, as it has been the boast of economists to deal, with things existent, and not theoretical (and assuredly the practical men of this country expect their children to be instructed by him in the laws which govern existing things); and it is therefore only in the name of your practical readers that I challenged him, and to-day repeat my challenge, in terms from which I trust he will not again attempt to escape by circumambient criticism of my works,[41] to define, in scientific terms, the limits under which his general statement that "supply regulates demand" is to be understood. That is to say, whether he, as Professor of Political Economy, is about to explain the relations (A) of rational and satiable demand with beneficial and benevolently-directly supply; or (B) of irrational and insatiable demand with mischievous and malevolently-directed supply; or (C) of a demand of which he cannot explain the character with a supply of which he cannot predict the consequence?
I am, etc.,
J. Ruskin.