This is precision with a vengeance. Now, though I am very far from intending to say that the writers on political economy have been sufficiently agreed as to the precise meaning which they attach to the terms _value of a commodity_, when no express reference is made to the object with which it is to be compared, yet, by drawing a marked line of distinction between what has been called the real value of commodities and their nominal value, or, more correctly, between their _value_ and their _price_, they have avoided the prodigious confusion which would arise from a commodity having a thousand or ten thousand different values at the same time. Whenever they use the term value of a commodity alone, and speak of its rising or falling, if they do not mean money-price, they refer either to its power of purchasing generally, or to something expressive of its elementary cost of production. In either case, some general and very important information is communicated; but the value of a commodity, in the sense understood by the author, might be expressed a hundred different ways, without conveying a rational answer to any person who had inquired about it. Further; the use of the term _value_, in the sense understood by the author, is entirely superfluous. It has exactly the same meaning as the term _price_, except that the term price has this very decided advantage over it, namely, that when the price of a commodity is mentioned, without an express reference to any other object in which it is to be estimated, political economists have universally agreed to understand it as referring to money. This is a prodigious advantage in favour of the term price, and tends greatly to promote both facility and precision in the language of political economy. When I ask, what is the _price_ of wheat in Poland? no one has the least doubt about my meaning, and I should, without fail, get the kind of answer I intended. But if I asked, what was the _value_ of wheat in Poland? I might, according to the author, be answered in a thousand different ways, all equally proper, and yet not one of the answers be of the kind I wanted. Of course, whether I use the term value or price, if I always expressly subjoin the object to which I mean to refer, it will be quite indifferent to which term I resort. But it is vain to suppose that the public will submit to such constant and unnecessary circumlocution. It would quite alter the language of political economy; and the kind of abbreviation which has taken place in application to the term price could not take place in regard to value, according to the doctrines of the author; because, when the _value_ of a commodity is used alone, like the price of a commodity, no one object rather than another is entitled to a preference for the expression of that value. The author says distinctly in a note,[60] that money-value has no greater claim to the general term _value_ than any other kind of value.