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Updated: May 19, 2025
Perhaps the atmosphere of restraint he had detected in the Buchers at the last, amid all their cordial expressions and deeds, was due to the changed rôle they then knew they were playing as against an American "pig." At their frontier all human relations obligations, honor, amicability, trust, good faith, religion were exchangeable for brutality and dastardly brutality.
Its capital, therefore, must necessarily decay, and, together with it, the exchangeable value of the annual produce of its industry. This balance of produce and consumption is entirely different from what is called the balance of trade. It might take place in a nation which had no foreign trade, but which was entirely separated from all the world.
Humanity does all things by infinitely small degrees: after comprehending the fact that all products of labor must be submitted to a proportional measure which makes all of them equally exchangeable, it begins by giving this attribute of absolute exchangeability to a special product, which shall become the type and model of all others.
I have never lost my taste for alchemy since I first got hold of the Palladium Spagyricum of Peter John Faber, and sought in vain, it is true through its pages for a clear, intelligible, and practical statement of how I could turn my lead sinkers and the weights of tall kitchen clock into good yellow gold, specific gravity 19.2, and exchangeable for whatever I then wanted, and for many more things than I was then aware of.
And again I find myself regretfully in direct conflict with Mr. Wells. But it is not easy to take his meditations on American commercial morality in entire seriousness. In practice I don't believe there is. Exchangeable things are supposed to have a fixed quality called their value, and honest trading is I am told the exchange of things of equal value.
Let us suppose, what was indeed far from being the case, that Georgia so far advanced in improvement as to rival Carolina in raw materials, and exchangeable commodities, and to undersell her at the markets in Europe: This advantage could only arise from the superior quality of her lands, the cheapness of her labour, or her landed men being contented with smaller profits.
Useful value and exchangeable value remain, then, in inevitable attachment, although it is their nature continually to tend towards mutual exclusion. I shall not fatigue the reader with a refutation of the logomachies which might be offered in explanation of this subject: of the contradiction inherent in the idea of value there is no assignable cause, no possible explanation.
It is evident, however, that two nations might increase exactly with the same rapidity in the exchangeable value of the annual produce of their land and labour, yet if one had applied itself chiefly to agriculture, and the other chiefly to commerce, the funds for the maintenance of labour, and consequently the effect of the increase of wealth in each nation, would be extremely different.
And yet and what an idea does the fact present of the multitudinous resources, the unrivalled industry, the latent power of this country! all that heap of precious metals, all that is besides in circulation, with the addition of the bank-note currency, is comparatively nothing when weighed against the true and real exchangeable wealth of Great Britain; wealth of which this coined and convertible paper-money is merely the standard sign of value, the recognised medium by which all things are bartered.
I confine myself for the moment within the limits of the discussion, and say that SUPPLY and DEMAND, held up as the sole regulators of value, are nothing more than two ceremonial forms serving to bring useful value and exchangeable value face to face, and to provoke their reconciliation.
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