The economic value of an edition of a printed book, I said, as the reader will remember, depends in the most obvious way, not on the labour of compositors, but on the quality of the directions which the author imposes on this labour through his manuscript--the author's mind being typical of directive ability generally.

And what has Mr.Hillquit--the intellectual Ajax of the socialists--got to say about this?
"Whether a book," he says, "is a work of genius or mere rubbish will largely affect its literary or artistic value; but it will have very little bearing on its economic or commercial value." This, he goes on to argue, will, despite all my objections, be found to depend on ordinary manual labour, of which the labour of the hands of the compositors is that which concerns us most.

Nothing, according to him, can be more evident than this.

"For the market price," he says, "of a wretched detective story, of the same length as Hamlet, and printed in the same way, will be exactly the same as that of a copy of Hamlet itself." Now, if we consider Mr.Hillquit as a purely literary critic, we can but admire his subtlety in discovering that the literary value of a book is largely affected by the fact of the book's not being rubbish; but when he descends from pure criticism to economics, it is difficult, unless we suppose him to have taken leave of his senses, to imagine that he can himself believe in the medley of nonsense propounded by him.

For what he is here doing--or more probably pretending to do--is to confuse the cost of producing an edition of a book with the commercial value of that edition when produced.