Where Adam Smith has most failed in the use of his terms, is in the application of the word _real_. The _real_ value of a commodity he distinctly and repeatedly states to be the quantity of _labour_ which it will command, in contradistinction to its nominal value, that is, its value in money, or any other specific commodity named. But while he is thus using the word real, in this sense, he applies it to wages in a totally different sense, and says, that the _real_ wages of labour are the necessaries and conveniencies of life which the money received by the labourer will enable him to command. Now, it must be allowed that both these modes of applying the word _real_, cannot be correct, or consistent with each other. If the value of labour varies continually with the varying quantity of the necessaries and conveniencies of life which it will command, it is completely inconsistent to bring it forward as a measure of real value. And if it can, with propriety, be brought forward as a measure of the real value of commodities, it follows necessarily that the average value of a given quantity of labour, of a given description, can never be considered as in the slightest degree affected by the varying quantity of commodities for which it will exchange. Of this Adam Smith seemed to be fully aware in the fifth chapter of his first book, where he says distinctly, that when more or less goods are given in exchange for labour, it is the goods that vary, not the labour. It is evident, therefore, that to get right, we must cease to use the term _real_, in one or other of the meanings in which it has been applied by Adam Smith. If the term had never been applied in political economy in a different sense from that in which it was first used by Adam Smith, there could be no doubt that it might be advantageously continued, and the expression _real value_ might answer its purpose very well, and save any question respecting the substitution of some other term, such as intrinsic, positive, absolute, or natural. But as the term _real_ has been very generally applied, by most writers, to wages, implying the real quantity of the means of subsistence and comfort which the labourer is enabled to command, in contradistinction to his nominal or money wages, the matter cannot be so easily settled, and we must come to some determination as to which of the two meanings it would be most advisable to reject.