Yet, notwithstanding these admissions, he proceeds with his rule as if there had been few or no exceptions to it: he especially estimates the value of wages by the quantity of human labour worked up in them; and as it is quite true, that if we look only to this element of value, the value of wages has a tendency to rise in the progress of cultivation and improvement, he has attributed the fall of profits which usually takes place in rich countries to the rise in the value of wages; and, in fact, has founded his whole theory of profits, which has been considered as the crowning achievement in the science, upon the rise and fall in the value of wages. “It has been my endeavour,” he says, “to show throughout this work, that the rate of profits can never be increased but by a fall of wages.”[8] Again he observes, “Profits—it cannot be too often repeated—depend on wages; not on nominal but real wages; not on the number of pounds which may be annually paid to the labourer, but on the number of days’ work necessary to obtain these pounds.”[9] Real wages, then, according to Mr. Ricardo’s definition, are determined by the quantity of labour worked up in the articles, which the labourer receives as a remuneration for his labour, whether food and clothing, or money. Now the meaning here attached to the term real wages, on which Mr. Ricardo’s theory of profits is made to depend, is quite unusual, and decidedly contradicts all the most obvious rules which suggest themselves for the application of terms in any science. In the first place, no one we believe ever heard, before the time of Mr. Ricardo, this term used in conversation in such a manner, that an increase of real wages would generally imply a diminution in the means of subsistence and comfort among the labouring classes and their families. Yet this would be the case, according to the sense in which Mr. Ricardo uses the term. Speaking of the different situations of the landlord and the labourer, in the progress of society, after describing the increasing wealth of the landlord, he says, “The fate of the labourer will be less happy; he will receive more money-wages it is true, (and the money of Mr. Ricardo is here used as measuring what he calls real wages;) but his corn wages will be reduced; and not only his command of corn, but his general condition will be deteriorated.” With a continued increase of real wages, “the condition of the labourer will generally decline, while the condition of the landlord will always be improved.”[10]