copious spring, or stone from an inexhaustible quarry, its value will in the long run be determined solely by the comparative labour required to procure it. But many commodities can only be obtained at all in limited quantities, and when the quantity required, or the demand, exceeds the quantity produced, or the supply, their value is proportionately enhanced. This permanent scarcity, or rarity as it is called, is the cause of the greater part of the value of all precious stones and metals, superior works of art, scarce and fine wines, antiquities, and curiosities of all sorts. The increased value which the owners of such objects are enabled from their rarity to obtain for them, beyond the mere cost of labour or capital by which they may have been procured or produced, is called monopoly value; a monopoly, as we have already explained in speaking of the higher classes of labour, being the possession of some more or less exclusive advantage, enabling its owner to obtain a higher return than others for his capital or labour. The owner of the vineyard which produces Johannisberg, is in possession of a monopoly which enables him to put a much higher price on his wine than can be obtained for the produce of other vineyards cultivated with the same expenditure of labour and capital. A person passing through the streets of a town is struck by a stained and dirtied piece of canvass at a broker's door. He buys it for a trifle, cleans it with a little labour and expense, and it proves to be a Claude or a Raphael, worth a hundred times after this discovery what it was before. It is the rarity of fine pictures by such artists that confers a

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monopoly value on them. Objects which are unique of their sort are often of great value in consequence. When there are but two known copies of a scarce work, it has happened that the possessor of one has bought the other at an extravagant price, for the purpose of destroying it,— his single copy being, in its unique state, of greater value in the market than the two were before. Monopoly value arises likewise from other circumstances of considerable moment, and particularly from the following:

Many commodities,—indeed the larger proportion of goods in every market, can be supplied in increased quantities only by an increased proportionate outlay. This principle teems with very important consequences, and follows necessarily from a very simple circumstance, which if it had received the attention it deserved from political economists, might have prevented their falling into no little confusion and error.

Value we must beg our readers to observe, has a strict relation to time and place. The value of a thing is the quantity of other goods or of money, that is, the price, it will command at a particular time and in a particular place. A thing may have a high value at one time, as ice in the dogdays; and no value at another, as the same ice in January. Again, that which is of little value in one place is of great value in another; as the old proverb about coals at Newcastle teaches. When therefore the value of anything is spoken of, reference is made, or understood, to some particular time and place; and when value in the general market is spoken of, the average of local

markets is intended; and, unless otherwise expressed, the present time.

Few objects are either sold or consumed at the same time and place where they are created. Nearly all articles require both more or less of time and labour, not merely to grow, prepare, and put them in marketable condition, but likewise to bring them from the spot where they are prepared, to the market or place where they are sold. In fact, the greater proportion of the most important objects of commerce-those which compose the food of man, and the raw materials of his clothing, comforts, and luxuries,-are raised by cultivation from the surface of the earth. But the process by which they are raised is one which requires much time—a season at least, often many -as well as an extensive surface of soil; and a very small proportion of them are consumed on the spot where they are grown, or immediately upon their production. Consequently, the cost or expenditure, necessary to produce these things for the bulk of their consumers, must consist not only of the labour of raising them, but likewise of the time consumed in their growth and preservation, and also of the time and labour employed in bringing them to market.

The value added to goods by the time necessary for preparing, persevering, and bringing them to market is, as we have seen, charged under the name of profit on the capital expended. That the cost of carriage of goods from the spot where they are prepared to the market where they are sold, is likewise a main element in their value, will not be disputed. In some articles, as stone, coals, water,

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&c., it makes up by far the greater part of their cost. In order to diminish this as much as possible, the demand of a particular market for any things which are raised by cultivation of the soil, will be supplied from the soils nearest at hand, that are most fitted for the purpose. But it is obvious that as the demand in that particular spot increases, the supply has to be procured at an increased cost, either from more distant soilscausing an increased expense of carriage to market-or from such soils as, though nearer at hand, are of inferior productive quality to those first taken into tillage-that is, which require a greater expenditure of labour or capital upon them to insure the same quantity of produce. It is, however, certain that there cannot be two prices (or values) for goods of the same quality, in the same market and at the same time; since no seller will take less from one buyer than he can get from another, and no buyer will knowingly give more to one seller than another will take for the same article. The competition of buyers and of sellers with one another in the same market, will always bring the value of articles of the same quality in one market to the same level. It follows, then, that as the demand in a market for such objects as are produced under the circumstances just spoken of increases, the value in that market of the whole supply of them must keep up to the level of the value of that part of the supply which is produced in the market at the greatest cost. If this portion of the supply could not command that price (excluding, of course, the results of temporary and accidental miscalculations)

it would not be brought to market. And if that portion can command that price, so will all the rest of the quantity sold. The producers of this last portion will be repaid precisely for the labour and time they have consumed in growing or fabri cating their article, and bringing it to market (in other words, the costs of its production,—the capital employed in producing it being replaced with a profit, and the labour repaid at ordinary wages), But the producers of all the other portions which were produced under easier circumstances, will get a surplus beyond the costs of production. And this surplus will be the greater in proportion to the greater comparative advantages of proximity to the market, quality of soil, facility of communication, or other favouring circumstances, under which their produce was raised and brought to market.*

*We beg the reader to observe that whenever we employ the word, to produce, or any of its derivatives, producer, production, and produce, we have reference to the production of an article at the market where it is offered for sale. It would be very convenient and tend materially to settle many disputed questions of political economy, if all writers would bear in mind and adhere to this rule in their employment of the term. The producer of corn is properly not the farmer alone who raises it from the soil, but the person, whether farmer or corn-dealer, who produces it at the market. The farmer is the grower simply, until he, or some other for him, brings it to market and offers, i. e., produces it for sale. The cost of production includes the cost of carriage to market as well as of the growth of the corn. In manufactures, it is not the man who weaves the cloth or cotton that is its producer, but the person who, having defrayed the costs of the raw material, the manufacture, and the carriage to market,―of the whole operation, in short, to which its existence owing, produces it there for sale. So the producer of an article, raised or fabricated abroad to