being purely relative, can not depend upon absolute profits, no more than upon absolute wages, but upon relative profits only. High general profits can not, any more than high general wages, be a cause of high values, because high general values are an absurdity and a contradiction. In so far as profits enter into the cost of production of all things, they can not affect the value of any. It is only by entering in a greater degree into the cost of production of some things than of others, that they can have any influence on value.
Profits, however, may enter more largely into the conditions of production of one commodity than of another, even [pg 273] though there be no difference in the rate of profit between the two employments. The one commodity may be called upon to yield a profit during a longer period of time than the other. The example by which this case is usually illustrated is that of wine. Suppose a quantity of wine and a quantity of cloth, made by equal amounts of labor, and that labor paid at the same rate. The cloth does not improve by keeping; the wine does. Suppose that, to attain the desired quality, the wine requires to be kept five years. The producer or dealer will not keep it, unless at the end of five years he can sell it for as much more than the cloth as amounts to five years' profit, accumulated at compound interest. The wine and the cloth were made by the same original outlay. Here, then, is a case in which the natural values, relatively to one another, of two commodities, do not conform to their cost of production alone, but to their cost of production plus something else—unless, indeed, for the sake of generality in the expression, we include the profit which the wine-merchant foregoes during the five years, in the cost of production of the wine, looking upon it as a kind of additional