Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/500

quotes from Adam Smith: ' There may be more labour in an hour's hard work than in two hours' easy business; or in an hour's application to a trade, which it costs ten years' labour to learn, than in a month's industry at an ordinary and obvious employment.'^[1] [Is not this Marx's' reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common character '? Cf. Jevons: ' Ricardo by a violent assumption, founded his theory of value on quantities of labour considered as one uniform thing.'^[2]

Though Adam Smith fully recognised the principle... he limits its application to ' that rude and early state of society,' etc .... as if, when profits and rent were to be paid, they would have some influence on the relative value of commodities, independent of the mere quantity of labour that was necessary to their production.^[3] [Does this not imply that in Ricardo's opinion the necessity of paying profits would have no such influence?]

And finally, after all his modifications, he returns to his principle at the beginning of Chapter IV.:—

In making labour the foundation af the value of commodities, and the comparative quantity of labour which is necessary to their production the rule which determines the respective quantities of goods which shall be given in exchange for each other, we must not be supposed to deny the accidental deviations....

(2) As to the sense in which Ricardo was understood by his disciples:—

1821. James Mill: The exchangeable value of all commodities is determined by quantity of labour.^[4]

1824. De Quincey: The ground of the value of all things lies in the quantity of labour which produces them.^[5]

1824. McCulloch: The fundamental principle maintained by Mr. Ricardo is that the exchangeable value of commodities depends exclusively on the quantities of labour necessarily required to produce them.^[6]

1827. To these may be added the opinion of Malthus: He (Ricardo) has not confined himself to the assertion that what he calls the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour worked up in it; but he states in substance the following

1. P. 15, note.
2. Theory, p. 179.
3. P. 16 in 1st ed.; omitted in 3rd and later editions.
4. In 3rd ed., 1826, p. 97.
5. The Templars' Dialogues, in Works, iv. 190 [ed. 1863].
6. Discourse on the Rise, etc., of Pol. Econ., 1824, p. 66. This sentence, in accordance with McCulloch's amusing habit, is repeated verbatim in his Life of Ricardo prefixed to his Works; and doubtless in many other places in McCulloch's writings.