brilliant sword-players, architects, and artists of all classes, savans, littérateurs—nay, sometimes philosophers not to be sneezed at were to be purchased in the Roman markets. And this, by the way, was undoubtedly the cause of that somewhat barbarian contempt which the Romans, in the midst of a peculiar refinement, never disguised for showy accomplishments. We read this sentiment conspicuously expressed in that memorable passage where Virgil so carelessly resigns to foreigners, Græculi, or whatever they might be, the supremacy in all arts but those of conquest and government; and, in one instance, viz. "orabunt causas melius," with a studied insult to a great compatriot recently departed, not less false as to the fact than base as to the motive. But the contempt was natural in a Roman noble for what he could so easily purchase. Even in menial domestics, some pretensions to beauty and to youth were looked for: "tall stripling youths, like Ganymede or Hylas," stood ranged about the dinner-table. The solemn and shadowy banquet, offered by way of temptation to our Saviour in the wilderness, (see Paradise Regained,) is from a Roman dinner; and the philosophic Cicero, in the midst of eternal declamations against luxury, &c., thinks it a capital jest against any man, that his usual attendants at dinner were but three in number, old, shambling fellows, that squinted perhaps, two of them bandy-legged, and one with a tendency to mange. Under this condition of the Roman slave-shambles as respected the demand, we must be sure that affirmative price would interfere emphatically to govern the scale. Slaves possessing the greatest natural or acquired advantages, would often be thrown, by the chances of battle, into Roman hands, at the very same rate as those who had no advantages whatever. The cost might be very little, or it might be none, except for uses. a three months' voyage to Rome; and, at any rate, would be equal. So far, there would be no ground for difference in the price. But if at all on a level as to the cost, the slaves were surely not on a level when considered as powers. As powers, as possessors of various accomplishments ministering to the luxury or to the pompous display of some princely household, the slaves would fetch prices perhaps as various as their own numbers, and pointing to a gamut of differences utterly unknown to any West Indian colonies, or the States of Continental America. In that New World, slavery has assumed a far coarser and more animal aspect. Men, women, or children, have been all alike viewed in relation to mere prædial Household slaves must there also be wanted, no doubt, but in a small ratio by comparison with the Roman demand; and, secondly, they were not bought originally with that view, so as materially to influence the market, but were subsequently selected for domestic stations, upon experimental discovery of their qualities. Whereas in Rome that is, through all Italy and the Roman colonies-the contemplation of higher functions on a very extensive scale, as open almost exclusively to slaves, would act upon the total market, - even upon its inferior articles, were it only by greatly diminishing the final residuum available for menial services. The result was, that, according to the growth of Rome, slaves were growing continually in price. Between 650-660 U. C. (the period of Marius, Sylla, &c.) and 700-710 (final stage of the Julian conflict with Pompey), the prices of all slaves must prodigiously have increased. And this object it was - viz. the slave-market, a most substantial speculation, not by any means the pearl market (as rumor stated at the time)—which furnished the great collateral motive (see Mitford's Greece) to Cæsar's two British expeditions. 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 for the labor produced, but for the labor producing. By the supposition, 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 is bought in perpe one year's value of land; and, if it tuity, 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. -- 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 |