for the labor By the sup LAND is another illustration, and of the first rank. Ricardo ought not to have overlooked a case so broad as this. You may easily bring it under examination by contrasting it with the case of a machine for displacing human labor. That machine, if it does the work in one hundred days of one hundred men in the same time, will at first sell for something approaching to the labor which it saves, say, for the value of eighty men's labor: that is, it will sell for what it can produce, not for what will produce itself; that is, it will sell for affirmative, not for negative value. But as soon as the construction of such a machine ceases to be a secret, its value will totally alter. It will not sell produced, but for the labor producing. position, it produces work equal to that of a hundred men for one hundred days; but, if it can itself be produced by twenty men in twenty days, then it will finally drop in value to that price: it will no longer be viewed as a cause equal to certain effects, but as an effect certainly reproducible by a known cause at a known cost. Such is the case eventually with all artificial machines; and for the plain reason, that, once ceasing to be a secret, they can be reproduced ad infinitum. On the other hand, land is a natural machine, it is limited, it cannot be reproduced. It will therefore always sell as a power, that is, in relation to the effects which it can produce, not as itself an effect; because no cause is adequate to the production of land. The rent expresses one year's value of land; and, if it is bought in perpetuity, then the value is calculated on so many years' purchase, a valuation worthy, on another occasion, of a separate consideration. For the present, it is enough to say, that land is not valued on any principle of cost,does not sell at negative value, but entirely on the principle of its powers or intrinsic qualities: in short, it sells for affirmative value, - as a power, as a cause, not as an effect. Popish reliques put this distinction in a still clearer light. The mere idea of valuing such articles as producible and reproducible, as effects from a known machinery, would at once have stripped them of all value whatever. Even a saint can have only one cranium; and, in fact, the too great multiplication of these relics, as derived from one and the same individual saint or martyr, was one of the causes, co-operating with changes in the temper of society, and with changes in the intercourse of nations, which gradually destroyed the market in relics. But we are far from deriding them. For the simple and believing ages, when the eldest son of baptism, the King of France, led by the bridle the mule who bore such relics, and went out on foot, bareheaded, to meet them, these were great spiritual powers; always powers for exalting or quickening devotion, and sometimes, it was imagined, for the working of benign miracles. This was their affirmative value; and when that languished, they could not pass over to the other scale of negative value, this was impossible; for they could not be openly reproduced: counterfeited, forged, they might be, and too often they were. But this was not a fact to be confessed. They could sell at all only by selling as genuine articles. A value as powers they must have, a value affirmatively, or they could have none at all. - SECTION V. - ON THE PRINCIPAL FORM OF EXCHANGE VALUE, VIZ. NEGATIVE VALUE. THUS far I have been attempting to extricate from the confusion which besets it, and to establish in coherency through all its parts, that idea of value in general, and those subdivisions of exchange value, which come forward as antithetic principles in the earliest stages of the deduction. And thus far it is undeniable that Ricardo's views were as unsound as those of any man, the very weakest among all, who had gone before him. Casual words which he has used, and the practical inference from his neglect to censure, betray this fact. But now the deduction has reached a point at which Ricardo's great reform first comes into action. Henceforward, the powerful hand of Ricardo will be felt in every turn and movement of economy. It may now be assumed as a thing established, that there are two great antithetic forms of value, and no more; viz. affirmative value, resting upon the intrinsic powers of the article valued for achieving or for aiding a human purpose, and negative value, which neglects altogether the article in itself, and rests upon an accident outside of the article, viz. the amount of resistance to be overcome in continually reproducing it. -- Upon the first form of value there is little opening for any further explanation, because no opening for any error, except that one error which arises from yielding, through lacheté of the understanding, to the false impression of the word "use," as though use" meant use beneficial, a use approved by the moral sense, or the understanding, in contradistinction to a false, factitious, and imaginary use. Whareas this is all pure imper 66 tinence; and the use contemplated is the simple power of ministering to a purpose, though that purpose were the most absurd, wicked, or destructive to the user that could be imagined. But this misconception is treated in a separate section (viz. in Section VI.). At present, therefore, and throughout this section, we have nothing to distract our attention from the single question which remains, Value in exchange being founded either on power or on resistance, and the case of power being dismissed to a subsequent section, what is it that constitutes the resistance? This value measured by resistance, -once for all, this negative value, being in fact the sole value ever heard of in the markets, except for here and there a casual exception, by much the greatest question in political economy is that which now comes on for consideration. How stood the answer to this question when first Ricardo addressed himself to the subject? According to many writers, according to Ricardo himself and Mr. M'Culloch, the answer was occasionally not amiss ; was only it was unsteady and vacillating. Is that so? at all: the answer was amiss, was always amiss, never right in a single instance. For what is it to us that a man stumbles by some accident into a form of expression which might be sustained at this day as toler ably correct, (simply because ambiguous,) if, by five hundred other expressions in that same man's book, we know to a certainty that he did not mean his own equivocal language to be taken in that sole sense-one sense out of two which could sustain its correctness? You urge as decisive the opinion of some eminent witness, who, being asked, "To whose jurisdiction does such a case belong?" had answered, “To the pope's," ing only that it did not belong to that of the civil power; mean whilst yet the proof was strong against him, that he had not been aware of two popes being in the field, pope and anti-pope, and whilst the question of jurisdiction had undeniably concerned not the old competition of temporal and spiritual, but that particular personal schism. A very dubious, because a very latitudinarian, expression is cited abundantly from Adam Smith, and the civil critics in economy praise it with vehemence. "Oh, si sic omnia!" they exclaim. "Oh, if he had never forgot himself!" But that is language which cannot be tolerated. Adam Smith appears to be right in some occasional passages upon this great question, merely because his words, having two senses, dissemble that sense which is now found to be inconsistent with the truth. Yet even this dissembling was not consciously contemplated by Adam Smith; he could not dissemble what he did not perceive; he could not equivocate between two senses which to him were one. It is certain, by a vast redundancy of proof, that he never came to be aware of any double sense lurking in his own words; and it is equally certain that, if the two senses now indicated in the expression had been distinctly pointed out to him, he would not have declared for either as exclusive of the other; he would have insisted that the two meanings amounted to the same, · that one was substantially a reiteration of the other, under a different set of syllables, — and that the whole distinction, out of which follows directly a total revolution of political economy, had been pure scholastic moonshine. That all this is a correct statement, one sentence will prove. What was the foundation, in Adam Smith's view, of that principal exchange value which in all markets predominates, and which usually is known as the cost value? This mode of exchange value it is which I am |