1. Malthus was a prolific and inconsistent writer on the subject of value.[109] His statement of the “empirical” laws of value was able, and materially advanced the theory in English political economy, but when he comes to the problem of the _measure of value_, as a part of what we call the philosophical account, his writings are of so little worth that it would be a waste of time to consider them in full. He was a great temporizer and user of makeshifts in questions of principle. Malthus denied the validity of Ricardo’s labor-cost _regulator_, but defended the labor-command _measure_, which in turn Ricardo rejected. He had a direct correspondence controversy with the latter on the subject of these two standards, but what we have left of this correspondence is in many places almost unintelligible to a modern student, unless read with infinite care.[110] 2. In his _Principles_, Malthus opens his discussion by drawing the established distinction between value in use and value in exchange; but immediately after this he makes an important alteration in the order of presentation of ideas, as followed by Smith and Ricardo. He begins with the “empirical” account of value. In consequence, when he turns to the question of the relation between labor cost and value, he is led to adjust the labor theory to the previously developed empirical theory. As pointed out in the introductory chapter of this essay, this was the beginning of the process which has resulted in the pushing aside of the labor theory in English political economy. Ricardo had been led, with injurious results, to adjust the “empirical” to the “philosophical” account. In a history of the law of supply and demand, or of the law of entrepreneur’s costs, the statement Malthus gave these principles would be of great importance.[111] Here we are concerned with his version of these principles only to the extent necessary to show the different _setting_ they give the labor theory from that in Ricardo’s work. 3. We find that in the view of Malthus, the primary principle of exchange value, or the principle of broadest application, is the law of supply and demand. The law of entrepreneur’s costs is a secondary principle. “It has never been a matter of doubt that the principle of supply and demand determines exclusively, and very regularly and accurately, the prices of monopolized commodities, without any reference to the cost of their production; and our daily and uniform experience shows us that the prices of raw products, particularly of those which are most affected by the seasons, are at the moment of their sale determined always by the higgling of the market, and differ widely in different years and at different times, while the labour and capital employed on them may have been very nearly the same.”[112]