any particular time and place as the nature of the thing would admit. But if, by rubbing and
wearing, forty-four guineas and a half generally contain less than a pound weight of standard
gold, the diminution, however, being greater in some pieces than in others, the measure of
value comes to be liable to the same sort of uncertainty to which all other weights and
measures are commonly exposed. As it rarely happens that these are exactly agreeable to their
standard, the merchant adjusts the price of his goods as well as he can, not to what those
weights and measures ought to be, but to what, upon an average, he finds, by experience, they
actually are. In consequence of a like disorder in the coin, the price of goods comes, in the
same manner, to be adjusted, not to the quantity of pure gold or silver which the coin ought to
contain, but to that which, upon an average, it is found, by experience, it actually does
contain.

By the money price of goods, it is to be observed, I understand always the quantity of pure
gold or silver for which they are sold, without any regard to the denomination of the coin. Six
shillings and eight pence, for example, in the time of Edward I., I consider as the same money
price with a pound sterling in the present times, because it contained, as nearly as we can
judge, the same quantity of pure silver.




CHAPTER VI.

OF THE COMPONENT PART OF THE PRICE OF COMMODITIES.

In that early and rude state of society which precedes both the accumulation
of stock and the appropriation of land, the proportion between the
quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects, seems to be
the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them for one
another. If among a nation of hunters, for example, it usually costs twice