cess of distillation, brewing, fermentation, as antithetically opposed to the raw material on which his skill is exercised. But this is only because naturally he abstracts his attention from processes belonging to a stage of labor previous to his own stage, and with which earliest processes personally he has no connection. Up to the moment which brings the raw material into his own hands, he postulates that article as thus far a product unknown to himself; viz. so far as it is a product from a skill or science not within his own profession. Else he is well aware that the sugar, the rice, the malt, the pears, all alike are valued, and can be valued, only upon that same consideration of so much labor applied to their production, which consideration it is that assigns a value and a price to the final product from his own professional series of operations.

SECTION VI.- ON THE TECHNICAL TERM, VALUE IN USE.

I. IT has been already explained, that the capital and influential error of Adam Smith, in his famous distinction between value in use and value in exchange, lies in his co-ordinating these ideas. Yet how? Are they not co-ordinate? Doubtless they are sometimes; doubtless they divide sometimes against each other as collateral genera of value; that is, whenever each excludes the other. In the case where a particular value in use has no value at all in exchange, there the two ideas stand in full antithesis to each other, exactly as Adam Smith represents them. But, secondly, value in use is often not co-ordinate but subordinate to value in exchange. Value in use sometimes excludes all value in exchange,

that is one mode. But value in use sometimes so entirely includes exchange value, as to form in fact but one subdivision of that idea; one horn out of the two into which exchange value divaricates.

This has been sufficiently illustrated in the last section, and it may be repeated once for all in this logical type or diagram:—

Value in exchange, as opposed to pure teleologic value bearing no price in exchange,

Subdivides into

Value in cost (as the ordinary ground of price).

Value in use (as a possible

ground of price).

Any man acquainted with logic will apprehend at once the prodigious confusion likely to ensue, when genera and species, radical ideas and their subdivisions, are all confounded together. A glass full of water, taken out of a brook in England to quench a momentary thirst, has only a use value; it stands opposed as a collateral idea (not as a filial, but as a sisterly idea) to value in exchange. And the two hostile ideas jointly, compose the general abstract idea of value as opposed to worthlessness; they are its two species as in Diagram I. But, on the other hand, a glass of medicinal water, having its value measured by the resistance to its production, is not opposed coordinately to exchange value; it ranks under exchange value as one of two modes:- 1. Teleologic power ( use); 2. Cost. It is only requisite to look back upon the case of the musical toy in Canada, selling, under pecu

=

liar circumstances, for a price founded on its teleology; whilst in London or Paris, at the very same time, in contempt of this teleology, (or consideration of serviceableness,) it sells on the principle of its cost, in order to see value in use no longer collateral and opposed to value in exchange, but, on the contrary, to see it coinciding with exchange value, and as one subordinate mode of exchange value, (incapable, therefore, of opposition to exchange value,) to see it dividing against cost as the other mode. In general, it may be said, that value in use, as excluding value in exchange, has no place in political economy; from the moment when it begins to interest the economist, it must be because it happens to coincide. with the value in exchange: it has itself become the value in exchange.

Here lay the original error, the πрwтоv уevdos, viz. in the false position of use value, as if always and necessarily contra-arranged to exchange value; whereas often enough the use value becomes for a time the sole basis of the exchange value. But this first error is followed by two others.

II. How came Adam Smith to say of water, that it bears little or no value in exchange? you might as well say that abstractedly, and without reference to specific gravity, pine timber was heavy or not heavy: it is heavy or not in the absolute sense, as you take much of that timber, or little of that timber. Specific gravity, indeed, already presupposes a past collation of weights, because it compares the weights under equal bulks: and then it becomes reasonable to say that lead is heavy, else the proposition is unmeaning. A little water, and in the wrong place, has no value: a great deal of water, and in the right place, even in watery England, has a very great value. Not merely as a fishery, but as a

bath for swimmers; as a reservoir, or Roman "castellum," for supplying the domestic purposes of a city; as a torrent, or water-power, for turning machinery; as a dock for shipping, as an anchorage for boats, as a canal for transporting great bulks and weights of commodities, water is often incalculable in its exchange value. The late Duke of Bridgewater derived a larger rental from one of his canals, than perhaps he could have done from half the diamonds in the regal treasuries of Europe or of Asia. 24 How has a man, in comparing water with diamonds, the right of staking against any single diamond one ounce of water, rather than ten thousand ounces, or than ten million ounces, or these rather than a grain? Even the ancients, little as they knew of political economy, knew better than this. Before they attempt a comparison between two commodities, they are careful to assign the particular quantities (usually the weights) between which the equations shall be made. Aurelian, for instance, would not allow his wife a silk (or possibly a silk velvet) gown, because he thought it too dear for authorizing by so authentic a precedent. But how dear? At that time, (say 250 years after Christ,) it was ἰσοστασιον τῷ χρυσῳ, drew in the scales against gold; a pound weight of the silk tissue exchanged for a pound weight of gold at the ordinary alloy. Thus Plautus, in his Epidicus [Act iii. sc. 3]:

"Næ tu habes servom graphicum, et quantivis pretii!

Non caru' est auro contra."

"Indeed you have an accomplished slave, and worth any money! He is cheap weighed against gold: i. e. against his own weight in gold."

Otherwise says an old French commentator, he might be sold au poids de l'or; and so in many scores of places. To make an intelligible valuation in gold, the weight of the article in question is assumed as the basis of the

equation. Else it is the old Cambridge problem,— Given the skipper's name, to determine the ship's longitude.

III. How came Adam Smith (by way of retaliation for stripping water of its exchange value) to say, that diamonds have little or no value in use? Diamonds realize the "use" contemplated by political economy quite as much as water. Water has the exchange value of diamonds, diamonds have the use value of water. The use means the capacity of being used, that is, of being applied to a purpose. It is not meant that, by possessing value in use, a thing is useful—is valuable quoad commodum or quoad utilitatem, but valuable ad utendum, utendi gratia, with a view to being used; not that it accomplishes some salutary or laudable purpose, but that it accomplishes a purpose, · however monstrous, pernicious, or even destructive to the user; and that its price, instead of being founded on its cost, (or the resistance to its reproduction,) is founded on its power to realize this purpose. From the Greek word for a purpose (or final cause), viz. reλos (telos), we have the word teleologic; to denote that quality in any subject by which it tends towards a purpose, or is referred to a purpose. Thus the beauty of a kitchen-garden, of a machine, of a systematic theory, or of a demonstration, is said to be teleologic; as first of all perceived upon referring it to the purposes which it professes to answer. On the same principle, all affirmative value, or value in use, is teleologic value,-value derived from the purpose which the article contemplates.25

Lastly, upon any other explanation of the word "use," as part of the term "value in use," the puerility of the consequences must startle every man whose attention is once directed to the point. It is clear that political economy neither has resources nor any motive for distin