beginning to show a
steadily-increasing Supply of elaborately-finished and coloured
lithographs, representing the modern dances of delight, among which the
cancan has since taken a distinguished place.

The labour employed on the stone of one of these lithographs is very
much more than Tintoret was in the habit of giving to a picture of
average size. Considering labour as the origin of value, therefore, the
stone so highly wrought would be of greater value than the picture; and
since also it is capable of producing a large number of immediately
saleable or exchangeable impressions, for which the "demand" is
constant, the city of Paris naturally supposed itself, and on all
hitherto believed or stated principles of political economy, was,
infinitely richer in the possession of a large number of these
lithographic stones, (not to speak of countless oil pictures and marble
carvings of similar character), than Venice in the possession of those
rags of mildewed canvas, flaunting in the south wind and its salt rain.
And, accordingly, Paris provided (without thought of the expense) lofty
arcades of shops, and rich recesses of innumerable private apartments,
for the protection of these better treasures of hers from the weather.

Yet, all the while, Paris was not the richer for these possessions.
Intrinsically, the delightful lithographs were not wealth, but polar
contraries of wealth. She was, by the exact quantity of labour she had
given to produce these, sunk below, instead of above, absolute Poverty.
They not only were false Riches--they were true _Debt_, which had to be
paid at last--and the present aspect of the Rue Rivoli shows in what
manner.

And the faded stains of the Venetian ceiling, all the while, were
absolute and inestimable wealth. Useless to their possessors as
forgotten treasure in a buried city, they had in them, nevertheless, the
intrinsic and eternal nature of wealth; and Venice, still possessing the
ruins of them, was a rich city; only, the Venetians had _not_ a notion
sufficiently correct even for the very common purpose of inducing them
to put slates on a roof, of what was "meant by wealth."

The vulgar economist would reply that his science had nothing to do with
the qualities of pictures, but with their exchange-value only; and that
his business was, exclusively, to consider whether the remains of
Tintoret were worth as many ten-and-sixpences as the impressions which
might be taken from the lithogr