the purpose; but inevitably, as this man attained the requisite point of excellence, he found that his talent was opening to him a safer channel for employing it: he could now keep a conscience. In the service of one vast public agency, that of travelling, so great has been the rise of qualifications, that of late even an academic examination has been talked of for the working engineers, &c., or (as a vicarious measure) a probationary appointment, contingent for its ratification upon the results of a rigorous trial. In medicine again, the improvement, having kept pace with the expansions of chemistry, botany, and physiology, has spread downwards to the body of druggists: these are the lowest class of medical practitioners; and I believe that now they look for higher attainments in their servants, or for a higher fee as the condition of communicating such advantages.

The writer of the "Critical Dissertation on Value' offended heavily against logic, when he represented these varieties of level in wages as inconsistent with Ricardo's doctrine upon the relative quantities of labor. Too readily he allowed himself to suppose that Ricardo had " overlooked" facts or consequences, which, by possibility, to have overlooked, would have argued a sheer incompetence in one whom elsewhere he does not deny to have been vigilant as well as able. Prices, says Ricardo, are directly as the producing quantities of labor; and the objection is,

that an article which costs three days' labor at half a crown, bears a price, suppose of ten shillings; whilst another article, costing the very same quantity of labor, but of labor paid at the rate of one guinea a day, may bear a price, possibly, of five guineas. How, then, does mere quantity of labor express itself exactly in the price? Answer, the gamut, the scale of differences as to the quality of labor is postulated from the first; no man could

be so slothful in his intellect as to have overlooked that: it forms the starting-point of the whole calculation. In this objection there is nothing which affects Ricardo. He is not called upon to reply. What would be an objection, is the case in which it should be shown that, doubling or trebling the quantities of labor, you would not, therefore, double or treble the prices of the product. Show that, on the rise of labor, in each case, from three days to six days, the price would not rise from ten shillings to twenty, or that it would not rise from five guineas to ten, (after making the allowances for machinery, &c., which it is superfluous to repeat,) and then you have destroyed Ricardo, but not else.

To profits the very same considerations apply. Profits are a mode of wages upon capital; and, naturally, men must be tempted by higher gains, contingent upon success, in order to compensate greater disadvantages arising to themselves from a particular employment. For instance, amongst modern Christian nations, what between a few sincere and many insincere prohibitions, at length the commerce in slaves has been denounced and made punishable. But that which at any period sustained and alimented this extensive trade, was the institution of slavery. Now this, considered as a bribe on the trade in slaves, flourishes more than ever. So long as a vast machinery of servile labor exists, diffused through the continent and islands of America, so long there will be a silent bounty always proclaiming itself upon the supplies needed for keeping up that machinery; for African slaves, under whatsoever causes, rarely keep up their own race. Talk, therefore, in what delusive or self-deluding language they may, our home politicians have yet devised no effectual means for suppressing a trade continually more lucrative, or for defeating a commercial interest which thrives by its own ruins. The losses by

interception are very great. Doubtless; but these losses furnish a sound plea for extra profits. The higher profit, up to a certain point, is indeed no more than insurance upon the general adventure; but the great advance on the personal share of the risk, which cannot be shifted from the captain, or chief authority on board, entitles him to look separately for an advance on his own individual dividend. This rate of advance, concurrent between the two interests of the captain and the owner, must grow with the growing embarassments of the trade. At length, indeed, these excesses of risk might reach a point at which they would no longer be supported by a corresponding development in the affirmative values of slave labor. A cost or negative value cannot transcend the affirmative value. A slave is but a working machine. So much work may be extracted from him; and the value of this work will mount for a time, as the cost of the slave mounts. But at length the work itself, the product of the slave, will have reached its maximum of price. After that, if the cost should still go on increasing, the slave passes into a source of loss. This tendency, according to the variety of circumstances, local or personal, ranges through a large scale of degrees: not until it becomes absolute can we look for an extinction of the commerce.

Such and many other causes for variation in profits are always at work. And this variation is real, and proportional to its known causes. But, finally, we are crossed by a new consideration, which sometimes seems to concern the mere ratio cognoscendi, and sometimes the ratio essendi. Often, to this day, it continues to be difficult, and in ruder times it must have been impossible, to approximate, even by conjecture, towards the true rate of profits in very many employments of capital. The dispute is not on the realities of the case, (here the profits are twenty, — there,

for no adequate cause, fifty,) but on the constructions of the case (this man rates the profits at twenty, — that man at fifty): or, again, the differences are reversed. Alternately, in short, we are puzzled by the principium essendi, and again, by the principium cognoscendi.

Now, then, with respect to both of these principles, the principle which makes profits what they are, and the principle which appreciates profits, I will call the reader's attention to four important mistakes.

I. It has been a blunder long current in books, and yet so momentous in its consequences, that no epithet of blame can be too strong for it, practically to confound the mere replacement of capital with the profits upon that capital. When a man distributes the cost of all articles into rent, profit, and wages; or when, upon a sounder economy, he distributes this cost into profits and wages, evidently he commits that mistake: much of the cost is frequently neither rent, profit, nor wages. It is simply a restitution of capital, which leaves the whole positive returns unaffected.

II. Adam Smith has sharpened our attention to the common case, where that, which really is no more than wages for services performed, ranks in popular appreciation as profit. A surgeon, for instance, receives as the reward or honorarium of his science, what is falsely classed as profit on his capital. Under the former case, that which is alike foreign to profit and wages was classed as profit; under this, the confusion takes place internally between the two.

III. When the question arises: How are profits kept down to the average level, or, in other words, suppose that,

by any combination amongst capitalists, it were determined arbitrarily to raise profits, where lies the true natural counteraction to such an attempt?—the common answer is, in competition. It is rashly assumed that all such injurious attempts are defeated by the instantaneous introduction of more capital, under rival interests, into the trade or manufacture. But this is not always possible. Capitalists do not so easily enter a trade or withdraw from it. In a country so exquisitely organized as England, it is true that capital moves with velocity where the capitalist cannot move; and of this we have a luminous explanation in Ricardo.

Ricardo, who, as a stockbroker, stood in the very centre of the vast money machinery accumulated in London, had peculiar advantages for observing and for investigating the play of this machinery. If our human vision were fitted for detecting agencies so impalpable, and if a station of view could be had, we might sometimes behold vast arches of electric matter continually passing and repassing between either pole and the equatorial regions. Accordingly as the equilibrium were disturbed suddenly or redressed, would be the phenomena of tropical hurricanes, or of auroral lights. Somewhat in the same silent arches of continual transition, ebbing and flowing like tides, do the reagencies of the capital accumulated in London modify, without sound or echo, much commerce in all parts of the kingdom. Faithful to the monetary symptoms, and the fluctuations this way or that, eternally perceptible in the condition of every trade, the great moneyed capitalist standing at the centre of this enormous web, throws over his arch of capital or withdraws it, with the precision of a fireman directing columns of water from an engine upon the remotest quarter of a conflagration. It is not, as Ricardo almost professionally explains to us, by looking out for new men qualified to enter an aspiring trade, or by with