The question of an absolute measure or unit of value (whether it is incapable of solution or not) is one which will be avoided in this essay as far as exhaustive or critical discussion is concerned. The purely statical part of the classical theories of value is best considered in isolation, and furthermore the question of an absolute measure is one of such extreme difficulty that it would require a separate essay of much greater dimensions than this history. Malthus examined the question at great length, and Ricardo paid some attention to it. A brief résumé of the classical discussion of this problem will be found in the note at the end of Chapter VII. It may be of interest to note that Adam Smith virtually contradicts the assertion made in the citation last given by his statement four lines later. “The labourer is rich or poor, is well or ill rewarded, in proportion to the real ... price of his labour.”[29] This leads to irreconcilable contradictions. Smith has said that a man is rich or poor according to the quantity of labor which his goods enable him to command. That is, the “real value” of a thing is measured by the amount of labor for which it will exchange. Thus a man is rich or poor according to the “real value” of his possessions. A changing physical quantity of goods will have the same “real value” if it command the same quantity of labor. Therefore a given quantity of labor must always exchange for the same amount of _riches_ in the sense of this word employed by Smith. If the real wages of a day of labor must always be the same quantity of riches, how can the laborer be richer or poorer according as the physical quantity of the goods of his real wages increases or diminishes? It might be said that Smith means that the laborer will be richer in life’s enjoyments if he receives a larger physical quantity of goods as wages. But Smith is estopped from such a statement because he has affirmed that the measure of _riches_ is command of labor or cost in labor, that the more or less of riches can be discovered only by the more or less of the labor commanded by the goods composing the riches.[30] It is necessary to mention Adam Smith’s so-called corn measure of value. Ricardo says, referring to Smith, that “sometimes he speaks of corn, at other times of labour, as a standard measure.”[31] The impression thus given is erroneous. Corn is not selected as a standard coördinate with labor, but is merely singled out from among commodities as being a convenient practical index of the real or labor standard. The practical question of corn-rents was interesting and called for some mention. Smith believed that a given quantity of grain possessed more nearly a constant value in different times than most commodities, merely _because_ corn is likely to remain from age to age in a steady exchange ratio with _labor_.[32] CHAPTER III THE EMPIRICAL ACCOUNT OF ADAM SMITH.