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usually the produce of one day's or one hour's labor."[167] Benjamin Franklin, whose merit as an economist Marx recognized, takes the same view and regards trade as being "nothing but the exchange of labor for labor, the value of all things being most justly measured by labor."[168] From the writings of almost every one of the great classical economists of England it would be easy to compile a formidable and convincing volume of similar quotations, showing that they all took the same view that the quantity of human labor embodied in commodities determines their value. One further quotation, from Ricardo, must, however, suffice. He says:-- "To convince ourselves that this (quantity of labor) is the real foundation of exchangeable value, let us suppose any improvement to be made in the means of abridging labor in any one of the various processes through which the raw cotton must pass before the manufactured stockings come to the market to be exchanged for other things; and observe the effects which will follow. If fewer men were required to cultivate the raw cotton, or if fewer sailors were employed in navigating, or shipwrights in constructing, the ship in which it was conveyed to us; if fewer hands were employed in raising the buildings and machinery, or if these, when raised, were rendered more efficient; the stockings would inevitably fall in value, and command less of other things. They would fall because a less quantity of labor was necessary to their production, and would therefore exchange for a smaller quantity of those things in which no such abridgment of labor had been made."[169] It is evident from the foregoing quotations that these great writers regarded the quantity of human labor crystallized in them as the basis of all commodity values, and their real measure. The great merit of Ricardo lies in his development of the idea of social labor as against the simple concept of the labor of particular individuals, or sets of individuals. In the passage cited, he includes in the term "quantity of human labor" not merely the total labor of those immediately concerned in the making of stockings, from the cultivation of the raw cotton to the actual making of stockings in the factory, but all the labor indirectly expended, even in the making and navigating of ships, and the building of the factories. One does, indeed, find hints of the social labor concept in Adam Smith, but it is Ricardo who first clearly devel
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