necessary condition of a sufficient supply. As by means of parish rates so applied, this supply can be obtained without such wages, the real costs of supplying labour no longer regulate the ordinary wages of independent labour.
In fact, in every kind of bounty upon production, the same effects must necessarily take place; and just in proportion that such bounties tend to lower prices, they show that prices depend upon the supply compared with the demand, and not upon the costs of production.
But the most striking instance which can well be conceived to show that the cost of production only influences the prices of commodities, as it influences their supply compared with the demand, is continually before our eyes in the artificial value which is given to bank-notes by limiting their amount. Mr. Ricardo's admirable and efficient plan for this purpose proceeded upon the just principle, that if you can limit the supply of notes, so that they shall not exceed the quantity of gold which would have circulated if the currency had been metallic, you will keep the notes always of the same value as gold. And I am confident he would have allowed, that if this limitation could be completely effected without the paper being exchangeable for gold, the value of the notes would not be altered, while the same demand for a circulating medium continued. But if an article which costs comparatively nothing, though it performs the most important function of gold, can be kept to the value of gold, by being supplied in the same quantity; it is the clearest of all possible proofs that the value of gold itself no further depends upon the cost of its production, than as this cost influences the supply compared with the demand: and that if the cost were to cease, provided the supply were not increased compared with the demand, the value of gold in this country would still remain the same.
It does not, however, in any degree follow from what has been said, that the costs of production have
