Labour is better than either, but Labour is ambiguous. We may measure the value of anything either by the labour it has cost us in the making of it, which gives us Ricardo’s sense of natural value, or by the labour it will purchase after it is made. Adam Smith,[579] who preferred labour both to money and corn as the measure of value, wavered between these two meanings of the terms. Malthus declares at once against the first sense. Labour, he says, in the sense of cost does not altogether determine value and therefore cannot measure it, even for similar places and times. In 1820 Malthus had been of opinion that a mean between corn and labour was a better measure of value than labour itself; but since 1823 he recurred to the view of Adam Smith,[580] and held that the amount of the unskilled common day labour of the agricultural labourer, which a thing will purchase or command, is a good measure of the value of it even at widely different places and times. “Agricultural labour is taken for the obvious reasons that it is the commonest species of labour, that it directly produces the food of the labourer, and that it is the most immediately connected with the gradations of soil and the necessary variations of profits. It is also assumed with Adam Smith, Mr. Ricardo, and other political economists, that, on an average, other kinds of labour continue to bear the same proportions to agricultural labour.”[581] The bodily exertion of the labourer does not change; it is the same sweat of the brow, the same sacrifice of physical force. When corn, for example, will command a less amount of labour than it would have done a century before, we may be sure it is because of a change not in the labour but in the corn; and we ought therefore to say not that labour has risen in value, but that corn has fallen. Malthus’ search for a permanent element in the changeable has led him to individual human labour as the economical unit. If the Chinese labourer has lower wages than the English, it is not because his labour is of lower value, but because his necessaries are of higher. Wages are higher in the United States not because labour is of higher value, but because necessaries are of lower.[582] Of course when skill enters into the labour, the unit is not the same; but, when we look only at unskilled, we find confirmation of Malthus’ view in the experience of the elder and the younger Brassey as employers of labour, that quantity for quantity “the cost of the labour [the expense of it to the employer] is the same everywhere” over the world.[583] The measure, however, is by no means out of court as regards skilled labour; the difference in kind may be stated in terms of a difference in degree. If the watchmaker’s labour be paid at the rate of 10_s._ a day, and the common agricultural labourer’s only at 1_s._ 8_d._, the former may be stated as equivalent to six days’ common labour.[584] Malthus has in his mind a scale of compensation such