_Measure of Value_, 1823—In what sense Labour a Measure—Difficulties—Arguments of the Tract on Value—Measure in the same Country—Measure in different Countries—Measure at different Periods in the same—Measure as applied to varying Value of Currency—The Royal Literary Society—The _Definitions_—Wages—The Minimum of Social different from the Minimum of Physical Necessaries—High Wages, how made Permanent—The “Wages Fund,” whose Invention, and how far a Reality—“The New School of Political Economy,” its three Tenets—A General Glut in what Sense possible. As the Rent and Corn pamphlets deal chiefly with Mother Earth, the tract on the Measure of Value[577] deals chiefly with Father Work. The search for a common measure of value is not, to Malthus, a purely academical problem. He considers such a measure desirable because in any inquiry into the wealth of nations it is important to distinguish between the rise of one commodity and the fall of another. The former is an intrinsic alteration of value which will affect every exchange in which the object is concerned; the latter an extrinsic which affects only the one exchange, of the object in question with the foreign object that has been altered. By value of course is to be understood economic value, or “the power of commanding other objects in exchange,” not value in the (not uncommon) wider sense, of usefulness in supplying wants.[578] The economic value of anything, taken in relation to some object which never changes its value from intrinsic causes, may be called the “natural or absolute value” of that thing, and the object with which it was compared may be called the “measure” of absolute or natural value, in other words, of the value which a thing must fetch if its supply is to be continued. While not only money but any and every object may be such a measure of value for a limited place and time, even money itself is not a good measure for widely different places or for long periods of time; and corn, which is better for long periods, is worse for short.