Proceeding on the same strange misapprehension or perversion of the language of other writers, the author says of the writer of the Templar’s Dialogues, “Following Mr. Ricardo, he appears entirely to lose sight of the relative nature of value, and, as I have remarked in the preceding chapter, to consider it as something positive and absolute; so that if there were only two commodities in the world, and they should both, by some circumstances or other, come to be produced by double the usual quantity of labour, they would both rise in real value, although their relation to each other would be undisturbed. According to this doctrine every thing might at once become more valuable by requiring at once more labour for its production; a position utterly at variance with the truth, that value denotes the relation in which commodities stand to each other as articles of exchange. Real value, in a word, is on this theory considered as the independent result of labour; and, consequently, if under any circumstances the quantity of labour is increased, the real value is increased. Hence the paradox, that it is impossible for _a_ continually to increase in value—in real value observe, and yet command a continually decreasing quantity of _b_, and this although they were the only two commodities in existence. For it must not be supposed that the author means that _a_ might increase in value in relation to a third commodity _c_, while it commanded a decreasing quantity of _b_; a proposition which is too self-evident to be insisted on; but he means that _a_ might increase in a kind of value called real, which has no reference to any other commodity whatever.” Apply to the position of this author the rule recommended in the last chapter; inquire, when he speaks of value, value in what? and all the possible truth on the subject appears in its naked simplicity. He adds afterwards again, “value must be value in something, or in relation to something.”[67] Now let the reader recollect that this passage was written by a person who sets out with saying that value in its ultimate sense appears to mean the esteem in which any object is held, and it will appear most remarkable. In the first place, what can the author possibly mean by speaking of the kind of value here called _real_, as if it had no relation to any thing else? The Templar, it must surely be allowed, has explained himself with sufficient clearness that by real value he means value in relation to the producing labour. Secondly, I would ask the writer, who says that the value of a commodity means the esteem in which it is held, whether the labour required to produce a commodity does not, beyond all comparison, express more nearly the esteem in which the commodity is held, than a reference to some other commodity the producing labour of which is utterly unknown, and may therefore be one day or one thousand days?