DEMAND AND VALUE 27

approaching complete satiety. So far as the wealthy classes
are concerned, their share in the demand for fruit, when it
has reached prices within the reach of the masses, is inelastic.
Short of such prices they habitually consume nearly as much
as they would care to consume even if the price fell to zero,
and hence further reductions of price do not stimulate to
increased consumption among them. This corresponds
strictly to the above statement as to goods whose price is
low relative to the means of the poorer classes,
A question which presents itself in this connection is
whether the importance of the satisfactions, afforded by the
consumption of a given amount of a commodity, is modified
by the fact that, in addition to that amount, a considerable
additional quantity is actually consumed, affording satisfactions
 to wants of a less degree of imperiousness. Itisa
position not easy to realise clearly. Yet occasions arise
when actual experience suggests a negative answer to the
question. Take as example the anthracite coal strike of
1002 in the United States. The price of coal rose to fully
double the ordinary figure in many places, and a great many
people realised that the satisfactions, ordinarily purchased at
a given price, were really important enough to induce giving
the double of that price in order to secure the means of
satisfaction. Uses of coal which afforded lower degrees of
satisfaction were restricted, and those who could not afford
to pay the extravagant prices demanded for hard coal, ze.
those whose demand, expressed in terms of money, fell short
of ruling prices, had to go unsatisfied, and to do as best they
could to attain by some other means the ends usually
attained by burning hard coal. Under such circumstances,
we realise that the importance of the services rendered by a
certain supply of a commodity is not to be measured by
the price paid when the supply secured is larger than this.
The series of marginal-demand-prices, corresponding to
all the varied possible scales of supply, register, in fact,
the utility of the marginal supply for each such scale of
supply, and that utility is secured even when it becomes
unnecessary to pay the full price to which we should be
prepared to submit rather than abandon the particular use