95 Neither is value in exchange a quality inherent in goods, but only a relation between them and other goods. Hence it is absurd to speak of a rise or fall of all values in exchange. If the goods A lose in capacity to be exchanged against goods B, goods B of course increase in exchange power as compared with A, and _vice versa_. It is necessary to guard against being misled here by the intervention of money, that is, by the custom universal among men of employing a definite kind of goods as a medium of exchange for all others. Yet there are many writers who have been thus misled. Thus _Galiani_, Delia Moneta (1750), II, p. 2, who regards the lasting increase of the prices of all commodities as an infallible sign of national prosperity. To the same effect is the motto of the Physiocrates: _Abondance et cherté c’est opulence_. In its coarsest form, in _Saint Chamans_, Nouv. Essai sur la Richesse des Nations (1824), 456, who would have that which is now the free gift of nature, to come to us or be produced only as the reward of toil. _Verri_, on the other hand, Meditazioni sull. econ. pol. (1771), ch. V, thinks that the number of buyers in a country should be as small as possible, and that of sellers as great as possible, in order that thus prices might be low; (as if every buyer was not, _eo ipso_, also a seller.) _ 96 Kaufmann_, Untersuchungen, I, p. 165 seq. Also, _Verri_, Meditazioni, XVII, 2. 97 The differences characteristic of poverty, indigence, managing to live, fortune and wealth, cleverly treated by _von Justi_, Staatswirthschaft, I, p. 449, seq. _Rau_, Lehrbuch I, § 76, seq., establishes the following gradation: privation and wretchedness, poverty, indigence, “getting on,” comfort, wealth, superfluity. _L. Say_ calls those who can satisfy the wants of luxury rich; well-to-do, those who can command the comforts of life; and wretched, those who cannot obtain a sufficiency of the objects of prime necessity. In France, the limits of these situations are marked by an income of respectively 60,000, 6,000 and 900 francs per family, so that a family with an income of only 300 francs per year is in a condition of wretchedness. (Traité de la Richesse, 1827, I ff., 71 ff.)