1. When it was asked by the student what determined the value of all commodities, it was answered that this value was chiefly determined by wages. When again it was asked what determined wages, it was recollected that wages must generally be adjusted to the value of the commodities upon which they were spent; and the answer was in effect that wages were determined by the value of commodities. And thus the mind was entangled in this inextricable circle--that the price of commodities was determined by wages, and wages determined by the price of commodities. From this gross _Diallælos_ (as the logicians call it), or see-saw, we are now liberated; for the first step, as we are now aware, is false: the value of commodities is _not_ determined by wages; since wages express the value of labor; and it has been demonstrated that not the _value_ but the _quantity_ of labor determines the value of its products. 2. A second case, in which Mr. Ricardo's law has introduced a simplicity into the science which had in vain been sought for before, is this: all former economists, in laying down the component parts of price, had fancied it impossible to get rid of what is termed the _raw material_ as one of its elements. This impossibility was generally taken for granted: but an economist of our times, the late Mr. Francis Horner, had (in the _Edinburgh Review_) expressly set himself to prove it. "It is not true," said Mr. Horner, "that the thing purchased in every bargain is merely so much labor: the value of the raw material can neither be rejected as nothing, nor estimated as a constant quantity." Now, this refractory element is at once, and in the simplest way possible, exterminated by Mr. Ricardo's reformed law of value. Upon the old system, if I had resolved the value of my hat into wages and profits, I should immediately have been admonished that I had forgotten one of the elements: "wages, profits, and raw material, you mean," it would have been said. Raw material! Well, but on what separate principle can this raw material be valued? or on what other principle than that on which the hat itself was valued? Like any other product of labor, its value is determined by the quantity of labor employed in obtaining it; and the amount of this product is divided between wages and profits as in any case of a manufactured commodity. The raw material of the hat suppose to be beaver: if, then, in order to take the quantity of beavers which are necessary to furnish materials for a thousand hats, four men have been employed for twenty-five days, then it appears that the raw material of a thousand hats has cost a hundred days' labor, which will be of the same value in exchange as the product of a hundred days' labor (previously equated and discounted as to its _quality_) in any other direction; as, for example, if a hundred days' labor would produce two thousand pairs of stockings of a certain quality, then it follows that the raw material of my hat is