The Academy of Sciences (not that of Moral Sciences, but the
other), going outside of its province one day, listened to a
paper in which it was proposed to calculate tables of value for
all kinds of merchandise upon the basis of the average product
per man and per day's labor in each branch of industry. "Le
Journal des Economistes" (August, 1845) immediately made this
communication, intrusive in its eyes, the text of a protest
against the plan of tariff which was its object, and the occasion
of a reestablishment of what it called true principles:--

"There is no measure of value, no standard of value," it said in
its conclusions; "economic science tells us this, just as
mathematical science tells us that there is no perpetual motion
or quadrature of the circle, and that these never will be found.
Now, if there is no standard of value, if the measure of value is
not even a metaphysical illusion, what then is the law which
governs exchanges? . . . . . As we have said before, it is, in a
general way, SUPPLY and DEMAND: that is the last word of
science."

Now, how did "Le Journal des Economistes" prove that there is no
measure of value? I use the consecrated expression: though I
shall show directly that this phrase, MEASURE OF VALUE, is
somewhat ambiguous, and does not convey the exact meaning which
it is intended, and which it ought, to express.

This journal repeated, with accompanying examples, the exposition
that we have just given of the variability of value, but without
arriving, as we did, at the contradiction. Now, if the estimable
editor, one of the most distinguished economists of the