Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is… - Alfred Marshall

[E]ach several want is limited, and... with every increase in the amount of a thing which a man has, the eagerness of his desire to obtain more of it diminishes; until it yields place to the desire for some other thing, of which perhaps he hardly thought, so long as his more urgent wants were still unsatisfied. There is an endless supply of wants, but there is a limit to each separate want. This familiar and fundamental law of human nature may pass by the name of the Law of Satiable Wants or the Law of Diminishing Utility.
It may be written thus:—
The Total Utility of a commodity to a person (...the total benefit or satisfaction yielded ...by it) increase with every increase in his stock of it, but not as fast as his stock increases. ...[i.e.,] the additional benefit ...from an additional increment of his stock of anything, diminishes with every increase in the stock ...

I am myself an uncompromising anti-Jingoe, a peace-at-almost-any-price man. Chamberlain is the only Unionist public man whom I have ever thoroughly distrusted. Excepting Napoleon, I believe that England's true greatness has had no such dangerous enemy since Lord North. When a radical, he delighted to dish his colleagues even more than to flout his opponents. He is now engaged in dishing his new colleagues and flouting his old friends.

If we compare one country of the civilized world with another, or one part of England with another, or one trade in England with another, we find that the degradation of the working-classes varies almost uniformly with the amount of rough work done by women. The most valuable of all capital is that invested in human beings; and of that capital the most precious part is the result of the care and influence of the mother, so long as she retains her tender and unselfish instincts, and has not been hardened by the strain and stress of unfeminine work.