purchasing, would fluctuate, while its price remained stationary.”[56] It appears then, that, whether Colonel Torrens’s view of value be quite correct or not, he draws the most marked line of distinction possible between the power of purchasing generally, and the power of purchasing a particular commodity, and is decidedly of opinion, that the latter, which is the sense in which the author uses the term value, should not be called value, but price. The authority of Colonel Torrens, therefore, whose views on the subject of value the author considers as so sound, is directly against him. But not only does Colonel Torrens attach a very different meaning to the term value, from that in which it is used by the author throughout the greatest part of his work, but the author himself, in his notes and illustrations,[57] has given extracts from almost all the distinguished writers in political economy, expressly for the purpose of showing the universality of an opinion respecting the nature and measure of value directly opposed to his own. The writers to whom he refers, are Adam Smith, Sir James Stuart, Lord Lauderdale, M. Storch, M. Say, Mr. Ricardo, myself, Colonel Torrens, Mrs. Marcet, Mr. Mill, the Templar’s Dialogues, and Mr. Blake. In the case of a proposition the nature of which admits of a logical proof, authority is of no consequence; but in a question which relates to the meaning to be attached to a particular term, it is quite incredible that any person should thus have ventured to disregard it. Much, however, of inconsistency, of illogical inference, and disregard of authority, might have been forgiven, if the proposed change in the meaning of the term value would introduce a much greater degree of clearness and precision into the language of political economy, and, in that way, be eminently useful to the progress of the science. But, what would be the consequence of adopting the meaning which the author attaches to the term value, and of allowing, according to his own words, that “the value of _a_ is expressed by the quantity of _b_ for which it will exchange, and the value of _b_ is, in the same way, expressed by the quantity of _a_?”[58] One of these consequences is strikingly described in the following passage of the author’s chapter on _Real and Nominal Value_, a distinction which he is pleased to call unmeaning. “The value of a commodity denoting its relation in exchange to some other commodity, we may speak of it as money-value, corn-value, cloth-value, according to the commodity with which it is compared: and hence there are a thousand different kinds of value, as many kinds of value as there are commodities in existence, and all are equally real and equally nominal.”[59]