experience, of a mercantile
community: but the conditions of its stability[24] and all other
relations of the currency to the material store are entirely simple in
principle, if not in action. Far other than simple are the relations of
the currency to the available labour which it also represents. For this
relation is involved not only with that of the magnitude of the store to
the number, but with that of the magnitude of the store to the mind, of
the population. Its proportion to their number, and the resulting worth
of currency, are calculable; but its proportion to their will for labour
is not. The worth of the piece of money which claims a given quantity of
the store is, in exchange, less or greater according to the facility of
obtaining the same quantity of the same thing without having recourse to
the store. In other words it depends on the immediate Cost and Price of
the thing. We must now, therefore, complete the definition of these
terms.

59. All cost and price are counted in Labour. We must know first,
therefore, what is to be counted _as_ Labour.

I have already defined labour to be the Contest of the life of man with
an opposite. 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 toil which we die in."

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.[25] The idea that it is a commodity to be
bought or sold, is the alpha and omega of Politico-Economic fallacy.

60. 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" (constant). It is literally the "Constancy" of the
thing;--you shall win it--mov