Page:Malthus 1823 The Measure of Value.djvu/21

 It must be allowed, then, that whenever two elements are necessary to the supply, and enter into the composition of commodities, their value cannot depend exclusively upon one of them, except by accident, or when the other can be considered as a given or common quantity. But it is universally acknowledged, that the great mass of commodities in civilized and improved countries is made up at the least of two elements—labour and profits; consequently, the exchangeable value of commodities into which these two elements enter as the conditions of their supply, will not depend exclusively upon the quantity of labour employed upon them, except in the very peculiar cases when both the returns of the advances and the proportions of fixed and circulating capitals are exactly the same.

It cannot, then, be said with any thing like an approximation towards correctness, that the labour worked up in commodities is the measure of their exchangeable value. But if to the accumulated and immediate