254 NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS. 
would by this means be obviated or explained away, we 
should obtain in their place a number of others equally 
irreconcilable, and also a series of unmeaning and identi- 
cal propositions. For instance, the proposition that a 
million of men always produced the same value, but not 
the same riches, would be reduced to this, that what a mil- 
lion of men produced always cost the labour of a million 
of men: a = a. The truth appears to be, that the idea 
of real value was seldom distinctly present to his mind, 
although there was almost constantly an obscure reference 
to it. 
NOTE 1 (page 178). 
In speaking sometimes of a commodity produced by an 
invariable quantity of labour as a measure, and sometimes 
of the labour itself in that character, Mr. Ricardo has in 
fact used the term in the two serises mentioned in note D, 
and passed from one to the other without being conscious 
of it. When he says, that a commodity produced by an 
invariable quantity of labour would serve to measure the 
variations of other things, his meaning, as we have before 
shown, amounts to this, that such a commodity would serve 
to indicate the variations in the cost of production, or pro- 
ducing labour of other commodities. But to employ the 
quantity of producing labour itself as a measure in this 
vense would be endeavouring to ascertain what is already