is defined virtually as “exchange value as arising from its causes,” the contention is mystifying. One is prone to acquiesce in J. S. Mill’s judgment that the argument of Malthus is a “vain subtlety.” CHAPTER VIII SENIOR 1. Senior’s little _Political Economy_[134] earned for him but a secondary rank in the literary history of the science. This is because the work, taken as a whole, is extremely unsystematic. It is also a little erratic. Senior was, however, a man of far greater merit than McCulloch, Torrens, or James Mill, and advanced many significant original doctrines, or rather parts of doctrines. The most noteworthy of these bear closely upon the theory of value; and if we put together what he said, in our own way, we shall obtain an important line of commentary upon the Ricardian labor-cost theory. The results tend more to destroy than to support that theory.[135] According to Senior, the conditions essential to value, which he defines as exchange value, are (1) utility, (2) limitation in supply, (3) transferableness.[136] We have seen how Malthus laid emphasis on the fact that cost can influence value only through affecting supply, and here we see the same thought put even more emphatically. It is _limitation of supply_ alone that in the first instance gives value to things of a useful nature. The following words, carrying out the lines of thought suggested by J. B. Say and Malthus, are remarkable: “It is true that wherever there is utility, the addition of labor as necessary to production constitutes value, because, the supply of labor being limited, it follows that the object to the supply of which it is necessary, is by that very necessity limited in supply. But any other cause limiting supply is just as efficient a cause of value in an article as the necessity of labor to its production. And in fact, if all the commodities used by man were supplied by nature without any intervention whatever of human labor, but were supplied in precisely the same quantities as they now are, there is no reason to suppose either that they would cease to be valuable, or would exchange in any other than their present proportions.”[137] Senior adopts this last heroic hypothesis only in passing, by way of exhibiting, in a striking way, what he considers to be the true relation of labor cost to value. In criticism of Ricardo, he says: “As limitation of supply is essential to the value of labor itself, to assume labor and exclude limitation of supply, as the condition on which value depends is not only to substitute a partial for a general cause, but pointedly to exclude the very cause which gives force to the cause assigned.”