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