on Economic Politics; by Lord Brougham, in relation to the foreign corn trade; and by almost every journal in the land, that has fallen under my own eye. But it is a metaphysical impossibility that Supply and Demand, the relation of which is briefly expressed by the term "market value," could ever affect price except by a secondary force. Always there must be a modificabile, (i. e. an antecedent price, arising from some other cause,) before any modification from Supply against Demand can take effect. Consequently, whilst "natural price" (the contradiction of "market price") is always a mononomial, price, founded on the relation of Supply to Demand, must always be a binomial. The latter chapters, as a sort of praxis on the law of value applied to the leading doctrines of Ricardo, were added for the sake of the student in Political Economy. They are not absolutely required; but they may have a use in tracing the descent of a pure theory-into consequences connected on the one side with theory, and on the other side with practice. Feb. 8, 1844. THE LOGIC OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. CHAPTER I. VALUE. SECTION I-VALUE IN THE GENERIC SENSE. THAT natural distinction, which takes place from the very beginnings of society, between value as founded upon some serviceable quality in an object too largely diffused to confer any power of purchasing other objects --and value as founded upon some similar quality in an object so limited as to become property, and thus having a power to purchase other objects, has long been familiar to the public ear under the antithetic expressions of "value in use" and "value in exchange." Who first noticed pointedly a distinction which must always obscurely have been moving in the minds of men, it would now be idle to enquire: such an enquiry would too much resemble A |