There appears to be some hitch, I think, in the working even of Mr. Ricardo's principles; but let him take his own example. "Suppose that in the early stages of society the bows and arrows of the hunter were of equal value with the implements of the fisherman. Under such circumstances the value of the deer, the produce of the hunter's day's labour, would be _exactly_" (italics mine) "equal to the value of the fish, the product of the fisherman's day's labour. The comparative value of the fish and game would be _entirely_ regulated by the quantity of labour realized in each." (Ricardo, chap. iii. On Value.) Indeed! Therefore, if the fisherman catches one sprat, and the huntsman one deer, one sprat will be equal in value to one deer; but if the fisherman catches no sprat, and the huntsman two deer, no sprat will be equal in value to two deer? Nay; but--Mr. Ricardo's supporters may say--he means, on an average;--if the average product of a day's work of fisher and hunter be one fish and one deer, the one fish will always be equal in value to the one deer. Might I inquire the species of fish. Whale? or whitebait?[50] [50] Perhaps it may be said, in farther support of Mr. Ricardo, that he meant, "when the utility is constant or given, the price varies as the quantity of labour." If he meant this, he should have said it; but, had he meant it, he could have hardly missed the necessary result, that utility would be one measure of price (which he expressly denies it to be); and that, to prove saleableness, he had to prove a given quantity of utility, as well as a given quantity of labour: to wit, in his own instance, that the deer and fish would each feed the same number of men, for the same number of days, with equal pleasure to their palates. The fact is, he did not know what he meant himself. The general idea which he had derived from commercial experience, without being able to analyse it, was, that when the demand is constant, the price varies as the quantity of labour required for production; or,--using the formula I gave in last paper--when _y_ is constant, _xy_ varies as _x_. But demand never is, nor can be, ultimately constant, if _x_ varies distinctly; for, as price rises, consumers fall away; and as soon as there is a monopoly (and all scarcity is a form of monopoly; so that every commodity is affected occasionally by some colour of monopoly), _y_ becomes the most influential condition of the price. Thus the price of a painting depends less on its merit than on the interest taken in it by the public; the price of singing less on the labour of the singer than the number of persons who desire to hear him; and the price of gold less on the scarcity which affects it in common with cerium or iridium, than on