56 
POLITICAL ECONOMY 
meaning in the conception. What is it ? 
What is the sense, it has been asked, of 
saying that an income of £100 a year is worth 
£1,000 ?—for that is in effect what we should 
say. Dr. Marshall’s answer is to my mind 
complete and convincing :— 
“ Of what avail is it to say that the utility 
of an income of (say) £100 a year is worth 
{say) £1,000 a year ? There would be no avail 
in saying that. But there might be use, when 
comparing life in Central Africa with life in 
England, in saying that, though the things 
which money will buy in Central Africa may 
on the average be as cheap there as here, yet 
there are so many things which cannot be 
bought there at all, that a person with a 
thousand a year there is not so well off as a 
person with three or four hundred a year here. 
If a man pays a penny toll on a bridge, which 
saves him an additional drive that would cost a 
shilling, we do not say that the penny is worth 
a shilling, but that the penny together with 
the advantage offered him by the bridge (the 
part it plays in his conjuncture) is worth a 
shilling on that day. Were the bridge swept 
away on a day on which he needed it, he would 
foe in at least as bad a position as if he had 
been deprived of elevenpence.”