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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.

was

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; only it was unsteady and vacillating. Is that so? Not 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 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;

one sense

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

treating in this fifth section. I have called it negative value; but, call it as you please, what is the eternal ground which sustains it? Adam Smith replied in one word, that it is LABOR. Well, is it not? Why, at one time it might have been said, with some jealousy, that it was; for this elliptical phrase might have been used by Ricardo himself to denote all which it ought to denote; and, without examination, it could not be known that Adam Smith had not used it in this short-hand way. But proofs would soon arise that in fact he had not. Suppose him questioned thus: 66 - By the vague general phrase 'labor,' do you mean quantity of labor, or do you mean value of labor? Price in a market, you affirm, is governed and controlled by labor; and therefore, as double labor will produce double value, as decuple labor will produce decuple value, so, inversely, from double value you feel yourself at liberty to infer double labor, and from decuple value to infer decuple labor. In this we all agree, -we moderns that are always right, and our fathers that were always wrong. But when you say that, when you utter that unimpeachable truth, do you mean, that from double value could be inferred double quantity of labor; as that in Portugal, for instance, because the same cotton stockings will cost thirty shillings which in England may be had for fifteen, therefore two days' labor is required, on the bad Portuguese system, to equal in effect of production one day's labor on the English system? Is this what you mean? Or, on the contrary, is it this, that therefore the value of labor (that is, wages) may be inferred to be double in Portugal of what it is in England?" Mirrors are undoubtedly cheaper by much amongst us English people in 1843 than they were in the year of Waterloo. I saw, in 1832, a small one of eight feet high, the very fellow to one which, in 1815, had been used for the

very same purpose, of filling up a five feet recess, overarched by wooden carvings, between two separate compartments of a library, and thus connecting the two into the unity of one. In every point—of dimensions, of reputed quality, of framing, and of application - the two mirrors were the same, and both had been manufactured on a special order to meet the disposable vacancy; yet the one of 1815 had cost forty-eight guineas, the one of 1832 had cost only thirty pounds. Now in reporting from Adam Smith labor as the ground of value, and in applying that doctrine to this case of the mirrors, is it your construction of the word "labor" that the young mirror had cost so much less than the old mirror in consequence of fewer days' work being spent upon it, or in consequence of the same precise days' work (no more and no fewer) being paid at a lower rate? I abstract from the quality of money in which the wages happened to be paid. We are all aware that, between 1819 and 1832, there was full time to accomplish that augmented value of money which the believers in the war depreciation 21 suppose to have been the natural antistrophe, or inverse series of motions pursued by our English currency under the speculative measures of Sir Robert Peel in his earlier years. For a moment, therefore, the reader might fancy that the cheapness of the one mirror was no more than an expression of a currency re-established in power, and that the dearness of the other had been a mere nominal dearness. But this fancy is destroyed by a comparison with the mass of other commodities, all of which must have been equally affected (if any had) by a fall and rise in the value of money. The dilemma, therefore, resolves itself into these alternative propositions; viz. that the later and cheaper of the mirrors had been produced through some smaller quantity

of labor, or else that the same unvarying quantity of labor had been obtained at a very much less rate of wages. Now, which of the two alternative explanations does that man declare for, who adopts the vague language of labor being the foundation of price? Does he make his election for quantity of labor, or for value of labor? Either choice will satisfy the mere understanding for the moment, since either will explain the immediate phenomenon of a large, and else unaccountable difference in the prices of the two mirrors: but one only will satisfy Political Economy, because one only will stand the trial of those final consequences into which economy will pursue it.

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Greatly it has always surprised me, that Ricardo should not have introduced in his first chapter that experimentum crucis which, about four years later, I found myself obliged to introduce in "The Templar's Dialogues"; because, as the matter now stands, Ricardo's main chapter is not so much a proof of his new theory as an illustration of it. For instance, he begins by saying that, in the earliest period of society, the hunter and the fisherman would exchange their several commodities on the basis laid down; viz. a day's produce of the one against a day's produce of the other. But if any opponent had gone a step further, so as next to suppose the case of a master fisherman employing twenty journeymen, and the hunter employing a similar body of ministerial agents, the whole question under discussion would have come back in full force upon the disputants. Circumstances would immediately have been imagined under which the quantities of labor had altered for the same produce, or (which is the same thing) where the produce had altered under an unvarying quantity of labor. Opposite circumstances would have been imagined, where not the quantities, but the rewards, or prices of labor, had altered; and then,

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