ll other home-made
commodities."[38] "It regulates," says Adam Smith, "the money price of
labour, which must always be such as to enable the labourer to purchase
a quantity of corn sufficient to maintain him and his family, either in
the liberal, moderate, or scanty manner, in which the advancing,
stationary, or declining circumstances of the society oblige his
employers to maintain him. By regulating the money price of all the
other parts of the rude produce of land, it regulates that of the
materials of almost all manufactures. By regulating the money price of
labour, it regulates that of manufacturing art, and industry; and by
regulating both, it regulates that of the complete manufacture. _The
money price of labour, and of every thing that is the produce either of
land and labour, must necessarily rise or fall in proportion to the
money price of corn._"

This opinion of Adam Smith, I have before attempted to refute. In
considering a rise in the price of commodities as a necessary
consequence of a rise in the price of corn, he reasons as though there
were no other fund from which the increased charge could be paid. He has
wholly neglected the consideration of profits, the diminution of which
forms that fund, without raising the price of commodities. If this
opinion of Dr. Smith were well founded, profits could never really fall,
whatever accumulation of capital there might be. If when wages rose, the
farmer could raise the price of his corn, and the clothier, the hatter,
the shoemaker, and every other manufacturer, could also raise the price
of their goods in proportion to the advance, although estimated in
money, they might be all raised, they would continue to bear the same
value relatively to each other. Each of these trades could command the
same quantity as before of the goods of the others, which, since it is
goods, and not money, which constitute wealth, is the only circumstance
that could be of importance to them; and the whole rise in the price of
raw produce and of goods, would be injurious to no other persons but to
those whose property consisted of gold and silver, or whose annual
income was paid in a contributed quantity of those metals, whether in
the form of bullion or of money. Suppose the use of money to be wholly
laid aside, and all trade to be carried on by barter. Under such
circumstances, could corn rise in exchangeable value with other things?
If it could, then it is not true that the value of c