will vary
inversely as wages; they will fall as wages rise. It appears too that no
commodities whatever are raised in absolute price, merely because wages
rise; that they never rise unless additional labour be bestowed on them;
but that all commodities in the production of which fixed capital
enters, not only do not rise with a rise of wages, but absolutely fall;
fall too as much as 68 per cent., with a rise of seven per cent. in
wages, if fixed capital be exclusively employed, and be of the duration
of 100 years.

The above statement, which asserts the compatibility of a rise of wages,
with a fall of prices, has, I know, the disadvantage of novelty, and
must trust to its own merits for advocates; whilst it has for its
opponents, writers of distinguished and deserved reputation. It should
however be carefully remembered, that in this whole argument I am
supposing money to be of an invariable value; in other words, to be
always the produce of the same quantity of unassisted labour. Money,
however, is a variable commodity; and the rise of wages as well as of
commodities, is frequently occasioned by a fall in the value of money. A
rise of wages from this cause will indeed be invariably accompanied by a
rise in the price of commodities: but in such cases, it will be found
that labour and all commodities have not varied in regard to each other,
and that the variation has been confined to money.

Money, from its being a commodity obtained from a foreign country, from
its being the general medium of exchange between all civilized
countries, and from its being also distributed among those countries in
proportions which are ever changing with every improvement in commerce
and machinery, and with every increasing difficulty of obtaining food
and necessaries for an increasing population, is subject to incessant
variations. In stating the principles which regulate exchangeable value
and price, we should carefully distinguish between those variations
which belong to the commodity itself, and those which are occasioned by
a variation in the medium in which value is estimated, or price
expressed.

A rise in wages, from an alteration in the value of money, produces a
general effect on price, and for that reason it produces no real effect
whatever on profits. On the contrary, a rise of wages, from the
circumstance of the labourer being more liberally rewarded, or from a
difficulty of procuring the necessaries on which wages are expen