Fourthly, the new sense in which the term real wages is used, is not maintained with consistency, or applied to old facts and opinions, with a proper allowance for the change that has been made. This is almost unavoidable, when old terms, which are quite familiar in one sense, are applied in another and different sense. It is particularly remarkable in Mr. Ricardo’s use of his artificial money, which is meant to be the measure of real wages. Thus, he says, “It may be proper to observe, that Adam Smith, and all the writers who have followed him, have, without one exception that I know of, maintained, that a rise in the price of labour would be uniformly followed by a rise in the price of all commodities. I hope I have succeeded in showing that there are no grounds for such an opinion, and that only those commodities would rise which had less fixed capital employed upon them than the medium in which price was estimated, and that all those which had more would positively fall in price when wages rose. On the contrary, if wages fell, those commodities only would fall which had a less proportion of fixed capital employed upon them than the medium in which price was estimated; all those which had more would positively rise in price.”[11] Now all these effects of a rise or fall in the wages of labour, depend entirely upon wages being estimated in Mr. Ricardo’s imaginary money. Estimated in this way, and in this way alone, Mr. Ricardo’s statement would be correct. But neither Adam Smith, nor any of his followers, down to the time of Mr. Ricardo, ever thought of estimating the price of wages in this way. And estimating them in the way to which they were always accustomed, that is in money, as they found it, they are quite justified in what they have said. According to Adam Smith, at least, who estimates the value of commodities by the quantity of labour which they will command, if the money wages of labour universally rise, the value of money proportionably falls; and when the value of money falls, Mr. Ricardo himself says, that the prices of goods always rise. The difference, therefore, between Mr. Ricardo and Adam Smith in this case, arises from Mr. Ricardo’s forgetting that he was using the term price of labour in a different sense from that in which it was used in the proposition objected to. In the same manner, Mr. Ricardo’s very startling proposition respecting the effects of foreign trade, namely, that “no extension of foreign trade will immediately increase the amount of _value_ in a country,” arises entirely from his using the term value in a different sense from that in which it had been used by his predecessors.