problem to many elements; Ricardo to few; and the latter, as certainly easier to understand, was readily represented as the likelier to be true. Simplicity in such a case is a treacherous virtue; and the apparent chaos may have been much nearer the truth than the apparent cosmos, if there was a hidden flaw in the latter and a latent principle of union in the former. Sound or unsound, such a principle may be traced in the most abstract discussions of Malthus. We shall find this true when we compare his views with Ricardo’s on the nature and causes of value itself, and the movements of prices. We may recognize it even in these discussions on the measure of value. The measurement of all value by individual human labour is of a piece with the author’s final view of population, where all is made to depend on individual responsibility.[608] The main weakness of the position is perhaps that by unskilled labour he means always agricultural, and does not sufficiently recognize how in manufacturing England it has perhaps become easier to measure unskilled by skilled than the latter by the former. The difficulty met Robert Owen, when in his _Labour Exchanges_[609] he not only tried to reduce all values to a common measure in labour, but to make labour a means of exchange, for which it is certainly worse suited than money. Labour as something to be rewarded by Wages has a more evident connection with the principles of the _Essay on Population_ than labour as the measure of all values. In this case unskilled agricultural labour is again the unit. The first “condition of the supply” of this labour is the necessaries of life, in such quantities as will enable the labourers to maintain their numbers or to increase them,[610] as the case may be. If the former only, the price of labour is not, as Ricardo says, the “natural,” but really a most unnatural price, for it would mean that the country giving it had arrived at the final limit of its resources.[611] Necessaries, however, are not a simple or even a fixed element. We can of course measure them in corn if we like; but they consist not only of the prime necessary, the staff of life, but of other absolute necessaries, of shelter and clothing, and many “conveniences” which have become necessaries, inasmuch as they are essential to healthy life, such as soap and shoes and candle-light. It has happily become a truism that the necessaries of life are not a fixed but an expanding factor. Even if competition were always to drive wages down to a “minimum of social necessaries,”[612] social are always beyond animal necessaries; our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous; and “the barest social necessaries” seem likely in process of time to mean a high standard of comfort. To raise the minimum of social necessaries is the way to raise wages really, universally, and almost irrevocably.[613] Malthus himself declares that “it is the diffusion of luxury” in this