e truth of this law of value is
not to be determined by considering these special objects of rarity,
but the great mass of things produced in our workshops and factories.

Now, note the second qualification. I say that the value of things
produced for sale _under normal conditions_ is determined by the
amount of labor _socially necessary_, on an average, for their
production. Some of the clever, learnedly-ignorant writers on
Socialism think that they have completely destroyed this theory of
value when they have only misrepresented it and crushed the image of
their own creating.

It does not mean that if a quick, efficient workman, with good tools,
takes a day to make a coat, while another workman, who is slow, clumsy
and inefficient, and has only poor tools, takes six days to make a
table that the table will be worth six coats upon the market. That
would be a foolish proposition, Jonathan. It would mean that if one
workman made a coat in one day, while another workman took two days to
make exactly the same kind of coat, that the one made by the slow,
inefficient workman would bring twice as much as the other, even
though they were so much alike that they could not be distinguished
one from the other.

Only an ignoramus could believe that. No Socialist writer ever made
such a foolish claim, yet all the attacks upon the economic principles
of Socialism are based upon that idea!

Now that I have told you what it does _not_ mean, let me try to make
plain just what it _does_ mean. I shall use a very simple illustration
which you can readily apply to the whole of industry for yourself. If
it ordinarily takes a day to make a coat, if that is the average time
taken, and it also takes on an average a day to make a table, then,
also on an average, one coat will be worth just as much as one table.
But I must explain that it is not possible to bring the production of
coats and tables down to the simple measurement. When the tailor takes
the piece of cloth to cut out the coat, he has in that material
something that already embodies human labor. Somebody had to weave
that cloth upon a loom. Before that somebody had to make the loom.
And before that loom could make cloth somebody had to raise sheep and
shear them to get the wool. And before the carpenter could make the
table, somebody had to go into the forest and fell a tree, after which
somebody had to bring that tree, cut up into planks or logs, to the
carpenter. And before he