But the men on the axle, who are in touch at all points with both the Production or 'supply,' and the Consumption or 'demand,' side of the wheel, know quite well; and it is they who, by practically gathering all producers or possessors of a given class of industrial product into a solid combination, and organizing them, keep the profits and interest of capitalists and financiers, as we shall see later on, higher than the normal, by the addition of a distinct percentage of 'forced gain' which could not have been seen if it had been left to the separate individual buyers and sellers to find out. It is they who know when a 'corner' is possible in any commodity, as in cotton, for example, inasmuch as, being in touch with both the extent of its production and its consumption, they are in a position to know the chances or likelihood of supply being short, in a way that would be impossible to any number of unorganized and unconnected individual buyers and sellers.

And this leads us to the last and most important advantage to be got from our wheel with its central axle; - namely the recognition of the fact that the men of the central exchanges are not merely the passive registrars of variations in value, but are initiators and partly controllers of them as well. It is they who, through their published market prices, give notice to all the world of when new lands must be brought into cultivation, when new mines may with safety be opened, when the different classes of capitalists can expand and when they must contract their operations, and so on. They also let the world know the points at which monopolies and exploitations of one industrial class by another are possible; - the significance of all of which will be seen farther on.

And now to come to this problem of Value, which is not, as we have said, a problem of the ultimate cause of Value in general, as that, indeed, would be easy sailing; and Jevons and Bohm-Bawerk need not have taken volumes to convince us that it has its roots ultimately in the single element alone of needs, desires, satisfactions, or, as they call it, Utility, (for that is a truism and platitude) but is a problem of the cause or causes which enter into the values of particular things - quite a different matter. And the first observation we have to make is, that as the problem, as we have shown, is a dynamical one; and as all dynamical things which have an environment in which they function, must follow the general law of Evolution from the standpoint of which this book is avowedly written; it follows that the market price of no commodity or service can be explained by detaching it and hanging it up by itself in mid-air, as it were, for inspection and analysis, but must relate and attach itself to the skirts of a previous market-price of the same commodity or service, and that to a previous one again, and so on - modified, of course, at each turn of the industrial wheel, by the new environment in which it finds itself; in the same way as the special points of a particular animal or plant can only be explained by the points of the animals or plants which were its immediate progenitors, modified by its own special environment.

With these as preliminary, then, let us put our commodity on the wheel, and try and see how its market-price is determined. We will suppose it to be the product of some new undertaking of which, although it may be launched with a starting price and a fairly accurate estimate of its costs by its projectors, there is no way of knowing how it will be received by the public, or what the returns are likely to be, until it is tried. At this stage although formally on the wheel, it is not yet economically on it; for until the wheel has carried it round full circle a time or two, the public will neither have had time to get cognizance of it, and to express by their demand for it at its starting price, the satisfaction they expect to get out of it, nor will they have settled in their own minds whether the starting price is one which will continue to suit their pockets. This is the tentative stage in fixing the value; if the commodity hangs fire, the price is lowered with the object of tapping a different class or stratum of the public; and if the demand still lags, again lowered; and so on.

When at last a sufficient number of experiments of this kind have been made, and the commodity has found its public as it were, then it is quoted, and falls under the cognizance, and to a certain extent control, of the central exchange dealing with that class of commodity, and can be said to be on the market, and to have had determined for it its market-price or value. Now when put in this way, it will be at once seen that this market-price is a relation between two sets of persons occupying for the nonce two different sides of the wheel, the producers and consumers, and so cannot be determined by either set alone; neither by the costs to the Producers alone, as Mill and Ricardo would have it, nor yet by the satisfaction, or 'utility,' given to the consumers alone, as Jevons and Bohm-Bawerk contend, but by some kind of relation between the two, as Mr. Hobson has shown. And the question now is, first, in what terms can this relation be best expressed so as to correspond to the facts, and to be not only true, but most practically serviceable; and secondly, how is our putting the article on a revolving wheel, going to help us to determine its value by the process of evolution?