If these premises be just, the table correctly illustrates all that it was intended to illustrate. If the premises be false, the whole falls to the ground. Now, I would ask the author, what sort of resemblance there is between ten yards of cloth and ten days’ labour? Is cloth the universal and the main instrument of production? Is the advance of an adequate quantity of cloth the natural and necessary condition of the supply of all commodities? Has any one ever thought of calling cloth and profits the elementary costs of production? or has it ever been proposed to estimate the values of commodities at different periods by the different quantities of cloth and profits worked up in them? If these questions cannot be answered in the affirmative, it is obvious that what may be true and important with regard to labour, may be perfectly false or futile in regard to any _product_ of labour.[80] The whole depends upon the mode of estimating the values of commodities. It would, no doubt, be an absurd tautological truism merely to state, that the varying wages of a given quantity of labour will always command the same quantity of labour; but if it were previously shown that the quantity of labour which a commodity commands represents exactly the quantity of labour worked up in it, with the profits upon the advances, and does therefore really represent and measure those natural and necessary conditions of the supply, those elementary costs of production which determine value; then the truism that the varying wages of a given quantity of labour always command the same quantity of labour, must necessarily involve the important truth, that the elementary costs of producing the varying wages of a given quantity of labour must always be the same. It is obvious to any person inspecting the table, that the uniform numbers in the seventh column, illustrating the invariable value of the wages of a given number of men, might, with perfect certainty, have been stated without the intermediate steps; but if they had been so stated, no conclusion respecting the constancy of the value of such wages could have been drawn. The intermediate steps, which show that the value of the wages of ten men is there estimated by the causes which had been previously shown to determine the values of all commodities, can alone warrant the conclusion that the uniform numbers in the seventh column imply uniformity of value in the wages.