it, one-tenth or one-twentieth of that value measures also a tenth or a twentieth of the quantity of labour.”[98] When an entrepreneur pays a certain sum for a machine, which he uses up in production, at the end a certain sum of value produced stands in the place of, and is imputed to, the destroyed machine. This sum of value is normally greater than the value of the machine, being sufficient, in fact, to replace the machine and leave a marginal fund of value, which we call interest. But Mr. Mill’s text discloses the fact that it is the gross value of the product of the machine which he designates by the term “profit.” If the machine lasts ten years, the entrepreneur receives these gross profits in ten annual installments. In purchasing the machine he has remunerated the labor which was expended in its production. Now he receives back that remuneration in ten parts. _Competition makes these ten parts the “equivalent” of the original whole._ “It thus appears that profits are simply remuneration for labour. They may, indeed, without doing any violence to language, hardly even by a metaphor, be denominated wages: the wages of that labour which is applied, not immediately by hand, but mediately by the instruments which the hand has produced.”[99] Such was the puzzle of value in “classical” times that a thinker of repute could resort to explanations shallow almost beyond belief. It is the italicized line, of course, which begs the question. The assertion that the gross return from a machine is the exact _equivalent_ of its cost price, might mean that the sum total of the “annuities,” in which the entrepreneur receives this return, is _equal_ to the cost price of the machine to him. In this case the statement is simply false. But if the intention be to admit that the sum of annuities is more than equal to the cost price, the plain import of the admission is unconsciously concealed under the word “_equivalent_.” For the excess of the value of the product of the machine which affords this surplus in the annuities is precisely the value out of proportion to the cost of the product in labor indirectly applied to it, that is, applied through the machine. To return to the cask of wine, _by hypothesis_, its value is in excess of proportionality to the quantity of labor it has cost. And yet Mr. Mill sets about to explain that its value is, nevertheless, in proportion to the quantity of labor it has cost, because it is a general principle that “profits” are “really wages of labour.” In fact,