own demand for them. The market is cheapest to those whose demand is small. A country which desires few foreign productions, and only a limited quantity of them, while its own commodities are in great request in foreign countries, will obtain its limited imports at extremely small cost, that is, in exchange for the produce of a very small quantity of its labor and capital.
The law which we have now illustrated may be appropriately named the Equation of International Demand. It may be concisely stated as follows: The produce of a country exchanges for the produce of other countries at such values as are required in order that the whole of her exports may [pg 400] exactly pay for the whole of her imports. This law of International Values is but an extension of the more general law of Value, which we called the Equation of Supply and Demand.270 We have seen that the value of a commodity always so adjusts itself as to bring the