market value above or depresses it below cost price; and he does not see how seriously his own qualifications[636] impair the truth of his theory of value even when the value is “natural.”[637] It is true, on the other hand, that the supply at any given time is a supply that will not be kept up unless the cost price be paid back. The cost price would certainly be the minimum below which prices could not permanently pass. But to Ricardo the cost in labour is the formal as well as the material cause of a value; to Malthus it is only the material, and only part of that, a mere _sine quâ non_, while the efficient is the demand, and the final is the consumption of the article by its last buyer or user. The third leading tenet of the new school, says Malthus, is that the rate of profits in a country depends on the fertility of the soil there, and not, as Adam Smith thought, on the competition of capital with capital for employment. Against them Malthus maintains that there is no necessary (though there is a frequent) connection between the productiveness of industry and the rate of profits, still less between the latter and the productiveness of any one single industry, such as agriculture. Profits depend on the proportion of the whole produce which “goes to replace the advances of the capitalist”; but this proportion may remain the same when the productiveness of industry is very various. In the previous eight or nine years, say from 1815 to 1824, there had certainly been no costliness in production. Corn had been cheap, and farmers’ losses had led to the discontinuance of high farming, and especially of the forced cultivation of the dear years. The production, therefore, was at the cost of much less labour. But profits, instead of higher, were much lower. Abundance of produce and competition of producers had caused a fall in the value of produce, so that it was possible for the labourer to receive a greater share of what he made, though his labour had not become more productive. Ricardo does not take sufficient account of the influence of prices, both on wages and on profits.