SUPPLY AND VALUE 45

growing in importance, but also those forms of organisation,
as a result of which the control of the supply of a commodity
is dissociated from the winning of a profit by its supply
alone; and thus increased attention must be given to the
principles affecting the determination of prices under
conditions which present substantially the same problem as
those of monopoly. These conditions are not new, but
they are requiring more careful study, because assuming
increased importance.
The third mode of limitation of supply introduces us to
conditions fairly typical of the more general aspects of the
problem of value. In what follows it will be assumed that
we are dealing with the case of goods regularly produced
for a regular market. The sale of existing stocks is counterbalanced
 by replacing the goods sold by exactly similar
goods. The production may be intermittent and the
consumption continuous as in the case of grain, or the
production may be continuous while the consumption is
spasmodic as is approximately illustrated in the case of
some season goods. Viewed from a somewhat broader
standpoint than that of the moment, such irregularities of
production or consumption may be ignored, or we may take
the whole period, from one time of rapid production or
consumption to the next succeeding, as the unit of time for
the purposes of the problem. To consider merely the
momentary situation throws us back on the problem of
fixed amount of supply already considered. We shall, then,
regard the cases now to be considered as cases of practically
continuous production to fill the gaps made by a practically
continuous consumption, Stocks in hand will merely be
necessary in the same way as a reservoir may be usefully
interposed between a continuously flowing stream and the
places where the water is required for use, to regulate minor
fuctuations in supply, and make a supply, which it may be
impossible to arrange with strictly unvaried continuity, serve
practically as a continuous supply, or adjust a regular supply
to a more or less intermittent consumption. Under such
conditions, though the goods which pass into consumption
may not be identical with those which are just passing out