I have already defined labour to be the Contest of the life of man with an opposite.[79] Literally, it is the quantity of "Lapse," loss, or failure of human life caused by any effort. It is usually confused with effort itself, or the application of power (opera); but there is much effort which is merely a mode of recreation, or of pleasure. The most beautiful actions of the human body and the highest results of the human intelligence, are conditions, or achievements, of quite unlaborious, nay, of recreative, effort. But labour is the suffering in effort. It is the negative quantity, or quantity of de-feat which has to be counted against every Feat, and of de-fect which has to be counted against every Fact, or Deed of men. In brief, it is "that quantity of our toils which we die in." [79] That is to say, its only price is its return. Compare "Unto This Last," p. 162 and what follows. We might, therefore, a priori, conjecture (as we shall ultimately find) that it cannot be bought, nor sold. Everything else is bought and sold for Labour, but labour itself cannot be bought nor sold for anything, being priceless.[80] The idea that it is a commodity to be bought or sold, is the alpha and omega of Politico-Economic fallacy. [80] The object of Political Economy is not to buy, nor to sell labour,--but to spare it. Every attempt to buy or sell it is, in the outcome, ineffectual;--so far as successful, it is not sale, but Betrayal; and the purchase money is a part of that typical thirty pieces which bought, first the greatest of labours, and afterwards the burial field of the Stranger; for this purchase-money, being in its very smallness or vileness the exactly measured opposite of "vilis annona amicorum," makes all men strangers to each other. This being the nature of labour, the "Cost" of anything is the quantity of labour necessary to obtain it;--the quantity for which, or at which, it "stands" (constat). It is literally the "Constancy" of the thing;--you shall win it--move it--come at it--for no less than this. Cost is measured and measurable only in "labor," not in "opera."[81] It does not matter how much power a thing needs to produce it; it matters only how much distress. Generally the more power it requires, the less the distress; so that the noblest works of man cost less than the meanest.