good the deficiency. How can we speak here with a straight face of the
relation between marginal utility and price?

These are very pertinent criticisms; but they do not make nearly as
much nonsense of the notion of marginal utility as may seem at
first. The last point, indeed, serves rather to give it a fresh aspect
of much significance. Those of us who do not bother about the price we
pay for our ties and collars owe a debt of gratitude, of which we are
insufficiently conscious, to the more careful people who do; as well
as to the custom which prevails in shops in Western countries (as
distinct from the bazaars of the East) of charging as a rule a uniform
price to all customers. If _we_ were the only people who bought these
things, an enterprising salesman would be able to charge us very much
what he chose. He could put up his price, and we would hardly be aware
of it. And, as by lowering his price he could not tempt us to buy any
more, price reductions would be few and far between. But fortunately
there are always some people who do know what the price is, even when
they are buying collars and ties; and who will adjust the amount they
buy in accordance with the price. It is these worthy people who make
the laws of demand work out as we well know they do. It is they who
will curtail their consumption if the price has fallen and it is they
who constitute the seller's problem, and help to keep down prices for
the rest of us. The rest of us--it is well to be quite blunt about
it--simply do not count in this connection. We have no cause then to
plume ourselves that we have disproved the truth of economic laws when
we declare that we seldom weigh the utility of anything against its
price. All that this shows is that our actions are too insignificant
to be described by economic laws since they exert no appreciable
influence on the price of anything. And this in turn shows the extreme
importance of grasping clearly the conception of the margin. Just as