ECONOMICS OF INDUSTRY BEING THE FIRST VOLUME OF ELEMENTS OF ECONOMICS BY ALFRED MARSHALL Professor of Political Economy in the University of Cambridge, THIRD EDITION London: MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED. NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 1899 [All Rights reserved.] First Edition printed 1892. Reprinted 1893, 1894. Second Edition 1896. Reprinted 1898, January 1899. Third Edition, August 1899. BODLEIAN 17:11 1899 LIBRARY PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. N the present edition of this volume some matters which IN had been found difficult by beginners have been omitted, others have been relegated to Appendices, and others again have been explained at greater length than before. Book IV. remains nearly unchanged; and so does Book VI. except Chapters I. II. and xI.; but a considerable part of Books I. II. III. and V. has been rewritten. A short treatise on economics is apt to ignore many difficulties, and thus to suggest that its conclusions are absolute when they are really only conditional, and that they are universal when really they only apply strictly to a few simple cases. If it avoids this danger by pointing out many difficulties, with which it has no space to deal effectively, the reader may be perplexed. The little Economics of Industry, brought out by my wife and myself in 1879, seems to have erred by excess in the first of these directions; and it is perhaps through a reaction that the earlier edition of the present volume erred by excess in the opposite direction. There were indeed several points in the fundamental scheme of Distribution and Exchange, on which I had not made up my own mind in 1879: and, partly for this reason, partly because it was desired to make the book appear simple, difficulties were |