On the same principle, would it not be most ridiculous for any person gravely to propose that as rich and poor are relative terms, no one should ever call a man rich without mentioning at the same time the individual in relation to whom he was rich? It is perfectly well known, that when, in any particular place or country, a man is said to be a rich man, the term refers to a sort of loose standard, expressing either a certain command over the goods of this life, or a certain superiority in this respect over the mass of the society, which superiority it had been the custom to mark by this expression. In either case, it would be allowable to call the man really or positively rich. But if the proposed change were adopted, and instead of saying that Mr. John Doe was a rich man, we could only say that he was rich in relation to Mr. Richard Roe, as poor Richard might be little better than a pauper, Mr. Doe might, after all, be in very narrow circumstances. It is clear, therefore, not only that the terms real and positive may be legitimately applied in contradistinction to relative, when a relation to some more general object or standard is intended; but that the difference between the two sorts of relations is of the utmost importance, and ought to be carefully distinguished. It is not easy to conceive, therefore, how any writer could suppose that the language of political economy would be improved by a definition which would destroy this distinction, and make as many kinds of value as there are commodities, all equally real and equally nominal. In reference to all other political economists, whenever they have used the term value of a commodity, without specifically mentioning the object in which they intended to estimate it, I have always felt myself authorised, consistently with their general language, to consider them as referring tacitly either to the mass of commodities, to the state of the supply compared with the demand, or to the elementary costs of production. But when the author of the Critical Dissertation uses the term value, which he does frequently without specific application, his general doctrine must leave the reader quite at a loss to conjecture what he means.