The perseverance with which the author proceeds gravely to apply his peculiar definition of value to other writers, who have defined it differently, is truly curious, and must be allowed to be a great waste of time and labour. If, as he says he has repeatedly stated, “to know the value of an article at any period is merely to know its relation in exchange to some other commodity;”[63] and if, as I believe, no previous writer, in referring to the value of an article at any period ever thought or said that it could be expressed by its relation in exchange to any other contemporary commodity indifferently, it might at once be presumed, without further trouble, that almost all former propositions involving the term value would turn out to be either false or futile. It was quite unnecessary for him, therefore, to go into the detail; but as he has done so, it may be useful to follow him in some of his conclusions, as it may assist in drawing attention to a subject which lies at the bottom of many of the difficulties in political economy, and has not been sufficiently considered. One of the first effects of the author’s definition is to destroy the distinction between what many writers of great authority have called _real value_, and _nominal value_. I have already had occasion to observe, that Adam Smith, by applying the term _real_ wages to express the necessaries and conveniencies of life earned by the labourer, had precluded himself from the power of applying it consistently to the _value_ of a commodity, in order to express its power of commanding labour; because it is well known that the same quantity of labour will both produce and command, at different times and under different circumstances, a very different quantity of the necessaries and conveniencies of life. But putting aside for the present this acknowledged inconsistency of Adam Smith, and taking real value as distinguished from nominal in the sense in which the writers who have so applied it intended, the author’s observations on these writers are not a little extraordinary.