The cases of the value of standing timber, previous to the employment of labor upon it, or of the value of old wine, which Ricardo freely confessed were beyond his philosophy of value,[79] had no terrors for McCulloch. In his abandonment to dogma, he solves the difficulty with ease by the following definition, one of the most crassly ridiculous originalities in the annals of political economy. It finds a place in this history to illustrate to what extremes the labor theory could be carried: “Labour may properly be defined to be any sort of action or operation, whether performed by man, the lower animals, machinery, or natural agents, that tends to bring about any desirable result.”[80] The distinction between the operations of men and those of machinery and natural agents is “on the whole objectionable because it gives countenance to the idea that there is some radical difference between the labour of man and of machinery, etc., whereas, in so far as the doctrines and conclusions of political economy are concerned, they are in all respects the same.”[81] Consider the example of a cask of wine, which is entirely finished as far as labor bestowed on it is concerned, and now possesses a certain exchange value. If let stand a few years it will be found to possess additional value. To force this case, McCulloch has decided to define whatever it be that “works” in the wine to be labor, and thus to affirm that the increased value is occasioned by the increased quantity of labor employed upon it. Malthus has made a rare criticism on this idea that cannot be omitted: “There is nothing that may not be proved by a new definition. A composition of flour, milk, suet, and stones is a plum-pudding; if by stones be meant plums. Upon this principle Mr. McCulloch undertakes to show that commodities do really exchange for each other according to the quantity of labour employed upon them: and it must be acknowledged that in the instance which he has chosen he has not been deterred by apparent difficulties.”[82] Should we grant McCulloch’s definition of labor, the explanations which he bases upon it involve an uncommonly “vicious” circle. Having included in labor any of the operations of all “nature” which tend to produce a desirable result, he is forced to place aside desirable natural operations that are “gratuitous.”[83] Having no way to measure natural operations by themselves, he decides, in effect, that whenever a commodity is found which possesses an exchange value in excess of that which would be proportionate to its cost in human labor, the thing to do is to add in enough labor of natural forces to restore the desired proportionality. Subsequently he adopted another line of reasoning, incompatible with this one, but his later method of establishing the absolute truth of the labor-cost theory was of the same calibre.[84]