the process of its production for the specific kinds of labour required, of all the ordinary money profits of the other capitals employed during the periods of various lengths for which they have been advanced, and of all the money rent concerned in the necessary materials and food obtained by the assistance of those powers of nature which are attached to the soil, then supposing things to be in their ordinary and average state and untaxed, it is quite certain that this price, and the ordinary and average prices of commodities, will be found to agree. To this price, which may fairly and usefully be called the natural, necessary, or ordinary price, the market prices are always tending. And this price determines the rate at which commodities usually exchange for each other. So understood, nothing can be more simple, or more generally applicable. The natural price of an acre of copse wood, or of a hundred sheep from the highlands of Scotland, which in a country generally well cultivated must be composed chiefly of rent, is as easily explicable as the natural price of corn on the last land taken into cultivation, where rent is quite inconsiderable. And the natural price of those sorts of goods where a large proportion of fixed capital is employed, and the returns of the circulating capital are unusually slow, and where consequently the price must consist chiefly of profits, may be as satisfactorily accounted for as the price of a straw bonnet, or piece of Brussels lace. Where the materials are of scarcely any value, the capital required is quite inconsiderable, and the expense of production must consist almost entirely of labour.
It is obvious that when, from any cause whatever, the money cost of producing a commodity increases, without some increased facility of obtaining money, the estimation in which such a commodity is ordinarily held, or its exchangeable value arising from intrinsic causes, proportionally increases.
In explaining the effects of demand and supply on the values of commodities, whether arising from temporary causes, or from the ordinary costs of produc-
