flag of Ricardianism flying when practically all other economists had deserted it: and this is something. Finally, he wrote the textbook that was the most successful general treatise England produced in the first four decades of the nineteenth century, and this, all the shortcomings notwithstanding, is not negligible either; 12 the book was more directly influential with the public than was Ricardo’s and really created what we might call lower-level Ricardianism. De Quincey, of Opium Eater fame, is a different case. His delight in refined logic makes him the very antipode of the rough and ready McCulloch. But he touched economics peripherically only. And his contribution, though interesting, was sterile. 13 None of the three added anything substantial, and the touches they did and 1895 respectively, by Professor J.H.Hollander. They are one of the most important sources for the study of that time’s methods of theoretical reasoning. 12 Speaking of texts, we should not pass by Mrs. Jane Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy (1816), which enjoyed a great success (7th ed., 1839). James Mill’s was an elementary, but not an easy, text on pure theory. McCulloch’s was the saleable stuff for the college course in general economics. Mrs. Marcet’s was economics for what we should call high-school girls. The reader should really look at it and note two interesting points about it. The first is the date: the book appeared before Ricardo’s Principles and, though not orthodox Ricardianism in every particular and though lacking Ricardian rigor, yet presents many of the most important tenets of the Ricardian school. This is significant, and greatly enhances the interest of the performance, at which it is quite out of place to sneer. Second, if nevertheless so many later economists did sneer at it, this was due not only to male prejudice but also to the nature of the publication: not for a moment did Mrs. Marcet doubt not only that the definitive truth about economics and economic policy had been discovered at last but also that this truth was so delightfully simple as to be capable of being taught to every school girl. This frame of mind was then common and is highly characteristic of that age— exactly as a similar frame of mind is common among modern Keynesians and not less characteristic of our own age. 13 ‘Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy,’ London Magazine, April 1824—let us bow to the editor who published such material and to the reading public that did not thereupon discontinue subscription—and Logic of Political Economy (1844). The book survives, I think, only through J.S.Mill’s generous quotations from it. I cannot see in it anything original. The concept of Difficulty of Attainment is Ricardo’s, and had already been formulated by the latter in a much more suggestive way (‘the real value of a commodity is regulated…by the real difficulties encountered by that producer who is least favoured,’ Principles, ch. 27). History of economic analysis 452 add—James Mill and McCulloch especially—were mostly of doubtful value. 14 They did not even succeed in summing up Ricardo correctly or in conveying an idea of the wealth of suggestions to be found in the latter’s Principles. What they did convey was a superficialized message that wilted in their hands and became stale and unproductive practically at once. It was not their fault that Ricardo’s system failed from the first to gain the assent of a majority of English economists—and not only, as the Ricardians tried hard to believe, of the dunces and laggards. This was owing to its inherent weaknesses. Nor was it their fault that the system was not made for a long career. But it was their fault that defeat came so quickly. Ricardo died in 1823. In 1825, Bailey launched his attack that should have been decisive on the merits of the case. Actually it was not, for schools are not destroyed so easily. But the decay of the Ricardian school must have become patent shortly after, for in a pamphlet published in 1831 we read that ‘there are some Ricardians still remaining.’ 15 In any case, it is clear that Ricardianism was then no longer a living force. The prevailing impression to the contrary can be easily accounted for. There were the henchmen who continued to stand by their guns and to teach exploded doctrine as if nothing had happened. There was the lag of public opinion, which is as slow to realize the passing of an obsolete doctrine as it is to realize the birth of a new one. And there was something else that is still more important and will explain why few if any historians will agree with me: there was Ricardo’s personal prestige, the great name that survived the work. As has been pointed out already, Ricardo, though not particularly fortunate as regards his immediate followers, has been all the more fortunate in another respect. J.S.Mill emphasized his early Ricardianism throughout and neither realized himself nor made it clear to his readers how far he had actually drifted away from it by the time he wrote his Principles. And, to a lesser extent, even Marshall and Edgeworth did the same thing. Moreover, Ricardo’s fame does not rest on his theoretical structure alone. On the one hand, there were his contributions to the theory of money and monetary policy and his theory of international trade. On the other hand, certain individual elements of that structure proved more durable than did the whole. The most important instance is his theory of rent, in spite of the fact that logically it should have been scrapped with the rest. Foreign zones of influence present, in part, a different picture. 16 Marx and Rodbertus did much to keep Ricardian thought alive. Partly by virtue of their influence, partly because of the weakness of domestic competition—and, later on, also because of the prevalent dislike for the Austrian theory—Ricardo remained to the end of the century the great theorist for most of those German economists who had any theoretical ambitions at all: the names of Wagner, 14 Ricardo is, e.g., not chargeable with either James Mill’s or McCulloch’s theories of interest or with the whole of the latter’s wage-fund theory. 15 This phrase from C.F.Cotterill, Examination of the Doctrine of Value… (1831), is quoted by Professor Seligman (op. cit. sec. 3), to whom I owe this reference. 16 For influence of Marx and Rodbertus, see below, sec. 5. Review of the troops 453 Dietzel, and Diehl are illustrative examples. For the period under discussion, but not beyond it, an analogous statement holds—or almost holds—for Italian economics. There are strong traces of Ricardo’s influence in the writings of Ferrara and in the textbooks. Rossi affords another instance if we count him as an Italian, but almost the only one of importance if we call him a French economist. France, following her own tradition, resisted Ricardian influence more than did any other country. In the United States, McCulloch’s textbook conquered a large amount of ground—tying with Say’s for first place in teaching. And there was also Ricardian influence on a higher level far into the next period—of front-rank names, Taussig’s is an illustration. What I meant by ‘fringe ends’ of the Ricardian school may be best illustrated by indicating the most important group that comes within the meaning of this term, the so-called Ricardian socialists. Of course, Marx was the greatest of Ricardian socialists, but the group is usually defined more narrowly; namely, so as to comprise a number of writers who, mainly in the 1820’s and 1830’s, argued the case of the working class on the proposition that labor is the only factor of production. Though this proposition harks back to Locke and Smith and not to Ricardo, it is likely that the Ricardian theory of value did encourage these socialist writers and also offered suggestions to them. Since the writings of this group, which of course is entitled to a great place in the history of socialist thought, offer but little that is relevant to a history of economic analysis, we shall confine ourselves to mentioning the two names that seem to be, for us, more important than others. William Thompson’s Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth…(1824) is a fair example, on its higher level, of the group’s argument, of its tempered equalitarianism, and of its habit of considering ideals of distribution, irrespective of the repercussions that realization of these ideals might have on production. Benthamite influence is strongly marked. Thomas Hodgskin’s Labour Defended against the Claims of Capital …(1825) and Popular Political Economy (1827) display at least traces of genuinely analytic intention. 17 It should be observed that as soon as an author combines the idea that labor is the only source of wealth and that the values of all commodities can be represented in terms of labor hours with the idea that labor itself is a commodity, he is inevitably drawn to the conclusion that the market mechanism robs the workman of the difference between the labor value of ‘his’ product and the labor value of the amount of work invested in that product. This, barring details, is the Marxist theory of exploitation. Accordingly, several Ricardian 17 J.F.Bray’s Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy (1839) has been reprinted by the London School (1931) and has thereby been transformed from the least into the most accessible of these writings. This is my only reason for mentioning it. See M.F Jolliffe, ‘Fresh Light on John Francis Bray,’ in Economic History, A Supplement of the Economic Journal, February 1939. History of economic analysis 454 socialists have been called forerunners of Marx. The phrase ‘forerunners’ may mean much or little, and if it is not made to mean too much, that statement may be allowed to pass muster, though I cannot find any instance (not even in Thompson and Hodgskin) that would amount to full anticipation of all that Marx’s theory of exploitation means within his system. But the charge of plagiarism is unfounded, if for no other reason, because that combination of ideas is bound to occur to any student of Ricardo who develops his teaching in the direction in which Marx wished to develop it. It is significant that this charge, though often repeated by economists, was in the first instance raised by a writer who was not an economist himself, Anton Menger (1841–1906; brother of the economist), to whose Recht auf den vollen Arbeitsertrag (1886; the English trans., Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, 1899, has an important introduction by H.S.Foxwell) the reader is for the rest referred. The theory of the more important writers of the group stands out better in Esther Lowenthal, The Ricardian Socialists, 1911. 3. MALTHUS, SENIOR, AND SOME OF THOSE WHO ALSO RAN In spite of our objections to speaking of national schools, we shall review by countries the rest of the men still to be mentioned. For England, since we have noticed Longfield already and since we reserve J.S.Mill and Cairnes for the next chapter—and Jevons, of course to the next period—we are left primarily with Malthus and Senior. But we must not confine ourselves to the performances that are known to history and leave all others in the shade. This would create a wrong picture. For historical performances are rarely like erratic blocks in a plain. They are more like peaks that rise from clusters of smaller eminences. In other words, a science develops by small accretions that create a common fund of ideas from which, by chance as well as by merit, emerge the works that enter the hall of fame. Therefore we must add at least a few of those writers who, though they failed to achieve historic fame, yet did important work and exerted an influence upon developments in analysis that are anonymous but not negligible. In taking some account of them, we shall also establish our proposition that the West-Ricardo school was never dominant in English economics. 1 (a) Malthus. 2 Marx poured on him vitriolic wrath. Keynes glorified him. 1 Let me repeat that writers whose performance was wholly in the fields of money, banking, and cycles will be dealt with separately. 2 Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was a clergyman and a professor of history and political economy at the East India College at Haileybury. As we already know he leapt into fame, from complete obscurity, in 1798 when he published his Essay on the Principle of Population (and ed. 1803; 3rd 1806; 6th 1826). Of his numerous other writings (neglecting those on money), the following are, for us, the most important: (1)…High Price of Provisions…(1800); (2) Letter to Review of the troops 455 Samuel Whitbread on… the Poor Laws (1807); (3) Observations on the Corn Laws (1814); (4) Inquiry into the Nature and Progress of Rent (1815); (5) Grounds of an Opinion on the Policy of Re- stricting the Importation of Foreign Corn (1815); (6) Principles of Political Economy (1820; i.e. one year after Sismondi’s Principles); (7) Measure of Value (1823); and (8) Definitions in Political Economy…(1827)—(4) and (6) being in turn the most important of these. See especially J.Bonar, Malthus and His Work (1885, 2nd ed., 1924; the standard work on Malthus, a little unsatisfactory with respect to pure theory), and Lord Keynes’s charming essay on Malthus in Essays in Biography (1933), which the reader is sure to enjoy and which makes it superfluous for me to say anything concerning the subject of ‘backgrounds and formative influences.’ Let me notice briefly the three accusations of plagiarism that have been leveled at Malthus by Marx. The first we know already: it refers to Malthus’ forerunners, Townsend especially, in the theory of population. The second concerns his theory of rent (diminishing returns). Marx was quite sure that Malthus had plagiarized Anderson but failed to produce any substantial reasons why: the type of argument that makes Malthus a plagiarist in this case would, if admissible, also make a plagiarist of Marx. The third concerns the theory of gluts: Malthus is supposed to have plagiarized Sismondi. Apart from the considerable differences between the theories of the two, there is no reason why Malthus could not have arrived at the position he took in the Principles from ideas that were present in his mind at least as far back as 1814 (see Keynes, op. cit. p. 141). Both the vituperation and the eulogy are readily seen to be due to prejudice. Marx—or the laicist bourgeois radical in him—hated nothing so much as the clerical cloth. Moreover, though he never gave any credit to the men who stood for free trade in food, he had nothing but withering scorn for those who did not. These were just hirelings of the landed interest for Marx and, of course, for his obedient followers. This way of disposing of Malthus’ contribution is no better than other people’s method of disposing of Ricardo’s on the grounds that he was a Jew and ‘for the money interest’ But Keynes’s partiality for Malthus, though morally admirable—for those are few who extol a forerunner and Keynes believed Malthus to have been a forerunner of his—went to lengths that are not much less unreasonable than was Marx’s hatred. 3 And right from the publication of the Essay on Population to this day, Malthus has had the good fortune— for this is good fortune—to be the subject of equally unreasonable, contradictory appraisals. He was a benefactor of humanity. He was a fiend. He was a profound thinker. He was a dunce. The man whose work stirred people’s minds so as to elicit such passionate appraisals was ipso facto no mediocrity. The man who realized that some economic problems are like the problems ‘de maximis et minimis in fluxions’ [calculus] was no dunce. His case illustrates the difference between ability and brilliance. Soundness would be the word for him if it were not for a failing that he shared with many—most?—economists. He had a few pet ideas, which he was bent on applying to practical problems. And when he did so, his usual common sense was apt to turn out nonsense. 4 Moreover he was not a good controversialist. 3 A passage in the essay referred to above actually reads as if Lord Keynes attributed to Malthus the ‘beginning of systematic economic thinking’ (p. 125). 4 The outstanding instance of this is his Letter to Samuel Whitbread (see last footnote but one). In this piece he argued against a housing program of Whitbread’s (cottages to be built by the parish authorities) on the ground that this would encourage History of economic analysis 456 For the public and also for a majority of the profession, Malthus was and is primarily the Malthus of the Essay on Population. His second title to fame, his contribution to monetary analysis, has almost escaped the attention of historians. His third title, the one that has brought his name to the fore in our own time, is his theory of saving and investment or his theory of ‘general gluts.’ 5 For the moment, we are concerned with a fourth title to fame only, namely, as the author of a system of economic theory that recoined the theory of the Wealth of Nations in a manner that was the alternative to Ricardo’s recoinage. Deferring consideration of his theory of rent and of other points of comparative detail, we must now make sure of this point. We have seen that Ricardo’s work, so far as general theory is concerned, started from the Wealth of Nations and recoined the latter’s theoretical contents by a method that centered in the concept of value. Exactly the same thing is evidently true of the work of Malthus as presented in his Principles. Except for his theory of saving and investment, which on the face of it seems to be Malthus’ own, 6 all the elements that enter into the analytic apparatus of that work, and even its terminological arrangements, point to the First Book of the Wealth of Nations. Only, whereas Ricardo recoined the doctrine of the Wealth by means of the labor-quantity theory of value, Malthus recoined it by means of the theory of value that A.Smith actually used, namely, the theory of supply and demand, 7 also following A.Smith’s example in choosing labor as a unit of value (numéraire). Therefore, Malthus adopted the line that won out ultimately and pointed much more directly to the Marshallian system than did Ricardo’s, notwithstanding the fact that it was with the latter and not with the former that Marshall endeavored to keep in contact. 8 improvident marriages. Even Keynes had nothing to say for this. He treated this just as an incident and condoned it good-humoredly. This means, however, that he failed to see its implications concerning the recommendations that emanate even from front-rank economists. Is the public really to be blamed for not taking them seriously? 5 For the discussion of these three phases of Malthus, see above, ch. 1 and below, chs. 6 and 7. 6 Unless we choose to hunt for forerunners far back in the eighteenth century, the only author that might qualify as a forerunner in this respect is Lauderdale. Sismondi is not a forerunner but a competitor though, so far as his teaching coincides with Malthus’, he holds priority as to publication. [J.A.S. had penciled a note—‘Quesnay?’] 7 We shall see later that the labor-quantity and the supply-and-demand theories should not, in logic, be put into opposition. But both Ricardo and Malthus took them mistakenly for alternatives. I adopt this view for the moment, because they do serve nevertheless to characterize the two different apparatus of analysis. 8 This tendency of Marshall’s, which runs throughout his Principles, has done much to obscure the actual situation. Here I shall only state by anticipation that, in spite of all that Marshall said, it is the supply-and-demand apparatus which dominates the analysis of his Fifth Book. There is, however, another confusion to which I want to draw attention at once. Analysis that works by means of supply and demand has no difficulty in covering short-run phenomena as well as long-run phenomena. It has been repeated over and over again that Malthus, unlike Ricardo, was primarily interested in short-run phenomena. To some extent this is true. But it has been assumed too readily Review of the troops 457 This also holds with respect to another difference between the two. We have seen that Ricardo’s analytic apparatus is geared to the problem of distribution—to the explanation of relative shares. Malthus, again returning to A. Smith and again anticipating A.Marshall, geared his apparatus to the analysis of the whole economic process. Hence he treated total output (Marshall’s ‘national dividend’), not, like Ricardo, as a datum, but as the chief variable to be explained. 9 Therefore, Malthus should indeed, though for a reason that does not coincide with that which induced Lord Keynes to arrive at a similar result, 10 stand in the history of analysis not only as the author of a valid alternative to Ricardo’s theory but as the sponsor (or rather as one of the sponsors) of the victorious one. This is much. At the same time, it is all. It is perfectly compatible with recognition of these facts that much less ingenuity went into Malthus’ than into Ricardo’s analytic schema, and that the former was throughout in the most unenviable position an economist can be in, namely, in the position of having to defend plain sense against another man’s futile but clever pirouettes. (b) Archbishop Whately and Professor Senior. Next, we look at Senior and the man who had been his tutor, Whately. The latter’s 11 importance for us is as great as it is elusive. He was not profound or very learned. He was not orig- that it was because of this interest in short-run phenomena that he selected supply and demand as the pivot of price analysis. This is not true. As should be clear from the text, his difference with Ricardo on the subject of value was much more fundamental than that—which Ricardo failed to realize. [It is possible that J.A.S. intended to eliminate this footnote. There was a faint line through it.] 9 Incidentally, this different point of view involved a different conceptualization and naturally led him to find fault with Ricardo’s. This he made particularly clear in his Definitions. Once more he expressed himself inadequately. He reproached Ricardo with a use of terms that was both unusual and inconsistent, as if this were all. But, just as before, there was something more fundamental at stake than terminology. What he should have objected to this time was Ricardo’s analytic intention of which the terminology was but the consequence. This intention was open to objection on the ground that it neglected the really relevant problems for the sake of propositions that were partly less relevant to the purposes of economic analysis and partly sterile. 10 For Keynes, the decisive point was Malthus’ attitude toward saving. For us, it is his sponsorship of the Smith-Marshall output analysis, which, as these two names suffice to show, is not necessarily bound up with that attitude. 11 Richard Whately, D.D. (1787–1863), was an Oxford don who became (Anglican) Archbishop of Dublin, where he founded the chair of political economy and rendered innumerable services of the same type. But they do not sum him up or characterize him. Primarily, he was a theologian and a leader of Anglican Church policy and opinion. But this does not sum him up either. Nor does, finally, his extensive activity in the Sozialpolitik of his age and country. His Introductory Lectures on Political Economy (1831; enlarged ed., only one known to me, 1855) and his Easy Lessons on Money Matters (1833) would not suffice to place him high as an economist. More interesting is an appendix to his Logic, ‘On certain Terms which are peculiarly liable to be used ambiguously in Political Economy’ (republished in the Library of Economics Reprint of Senior’s Outline). There is an instructive life by Miss E.J.Whately (1866) that pictures not only a man but also an environment and an epoch. History of economic analysis 458 inal or even brilliant. But his clear and strong intellect grasped calmly and firmly whatever it did grasp within an unusually wide range of interests. And in his age, country, and world, he was a leader of the formative type, an ideal illustration of what is meant by a key man. He led quietly, without seeming to do so, by the weight of his personality and of his advice which was never more valuable than when it was obvious. For in ecclesiastical politics, as in economics, the obvious is sometimes precisely what people are most reluctant to see. His most important service to economics was, however, that he formed Senior, whose whole approach betrays Whately’s influence. Senior 12 has been treated with comparative neglect by many economists and with uncalled-for scorn by some. In reaction to this, others have made a ‘genius’ of him, which he assuredly was not, if I understand what this word means. In our picture he will enter a triumvirate with Malthus and Ricardo: he was one of the three Englishmen whose works are the main stepping stones between A.Smith and J.S.Mill. But J.S.Mill had, logician though he was, no eye for Senior’s great performance. To the latter’s eternal honor— which he may have to share with Whately—it must be recorded, in the first place, that he attempted to unify and present economic theory according to the requirements of the postulational method, that is, as a series of deductions from four induced or empirical postulates, which we shall discuss in Chapter 6. This, even if the result fell considerably short of perfection, makes him indeed the first ‘pure’ theorist of that period—always excepting Cournot and Thünen, perhaps also Longfield—and suffices by itself to condemn those who refuse to pay their respects to him. In the second place, he adumbrated a much improved theory of value and a much improved theory of capital and interest. In the third place stand various smaller merits, some of which will be mentioned in their proper connection (population, decreasing returns, rent). In the fourth place, his brilliant contributions to the theory of money, to be mentioned in the last chapter of this Part, are, considered as purely intellectual performances, not inferior to Ricardo’s. I should put his subjective originality quite as high as Ricardo’s. Objectively, he had been anticipated, like Ricardo, on most of the individual points he made. Why, then, will so few economists agree with an estimate that puts Senior on a par with Ricardo, and why has his influence been restricted, substantially, to what J.S.Mill took over from him? 13 There are three excellent reasons for this that illustrate the difficulty of even as much comparative appraisal of economists as is inevitable, if we are to get a picture of a 12 Nassau William Senior (1790–1864) was a highly educated Oxford man of whose uneventful life, financed mainly by modest independent means, two facts only need be recorded here: he held the Drummond Professorship at Oxford twice (1825–30 and 1847–52); and he worked on several important royal commissions. His work with these commissions amounted to a respectable quantity of factual research and should also clear him from any suspicion of having been a doctrinaire laissez-faire man. Besides his lectures on money, now available in the London School Reprints (1931), only his Outline of the Science of Political Economy (1836; Library of Economics Reprint, 1938) is essential for us. We owe to Dr. Marian Bowley an excellent interpretation of Senior’s work and of its place in the history of economics (Nassau Senior and Classical Economics, 1937), to which I wish to call my readers’ attention and which enables me to cut short this note. Differences between her interpretation and mine are few and not important. Her tendency to distance Senior from the ‘classic’ economists—to whom he belongs according to the terminology adopted in this book—creates, however, some differences that are more apparent than real. Review of the troops 459 scientific situation at all. First, even if we are firmly resolved to estimate analytic merit only, we are apt to forget that Ricardo speaks to us from a pedestal, the pedestal of a reputation made in public discussion of political issues. There is no such pedestal under the figure of Senior. He counts as an analytic economist only. His work on problems of policy is buried in bluebooks that hardly anyone reads. His public utterances made no mark and he was a nobody, or almost so, to the general public. Second—and this was entirely the fault of his mental make-up—he was, what is the word? Lazy? By this I do not mean to suggest that he did not do a lot of work, but rather that he lacked the kind of energy that will run purposefully to definite conclusions. Ricardo was the horse that will take hold of the bit, put out its nose, and gallop for what it is worth. Senior was the horse that drops the bit, puts its nose down, and refuses to stretch. His Outline, still worse in arrangement than Ricardo’s Principles, discusses, criticizes, hesitates, swerves. It fails to impress, as the latter does, by ardor. Worse still, Senior’s reader gets the impression, nay, he is told in so many words, that all economic analysis amounts to is the search for, and consistent use of, a convenient terminology. Was this Whately’s fault? 14 In any case, nothing could be further from the truth and nothing could have been more uninspiring. Other economists—in fact most of them throughout the nineteenth century—used and defended the hunt for the meaning of words as a method of research. But nobody went as far as Senior, who seemed inclined to solve all problems of his ‘science of political economy’ by laying down definitions. We shall have no difficulty in understanding how such a ‘method’ must have impressed hostile critics. And, third, Senior had a curious talent for ‘putting his foot in it.’ Even good Homer dozes off occasionally, as an old slogan avers. But Senior dozed off, that is, uttered ineptitudes, rather too frequently. He was careless. And though able he was not clever. Thus, to quote only the most famous instance, he actually wrote (Letters on the Factory Act…1837) a statement to the effect that 13 J.S.Mill’s opinion of Senior was even higher than we might infer from his references to him: Mill had his copy of the Outline interleaved with sheets on which to note his own comments. These comments, published by Professor von Hayek in Economica, vol. XII, August 1945, are of the utmost interest. 14 With his usual common sense, Whately pointed out (in his Elements of Logic) that many of the issues economists quarreled about were purely verbal and that loose use of terms, both a cause and a consequence of loose thinking, was a fertile source of misunderstandings. But he overshot the mark, when he seemed to consider the possession of ‘a vocabulary of general terms as precisely defined as the mathematical,’ not only as an important desideratum but practically as the only thing needful. History of economic analysis 460 the profits of cotton mills, assumed to be 10 per cent, would be completely wiped out by a reduction of the working day by one-eleventh because the whole of those profits was produced in the last hour. This could not have happened with Ricardo, though we might put Senior above him in other respects. 15 (c) Some of Those Who Also Ran. For the reason explained at the beginning of this section, I shall now add a few more names. Other writers would no doubt mention other names, in part at least, but my selection is this: Bailey, Chalmers, Lauderdale, Ramsay, Read, Scrope, and Torrens. 16 Their performances differ widely in nature and are difficult to co-ordinate, though they do round off our picture. However much I wish to avoid cataloguing, I nevertheless present them in alphabetical order. Bailey, 17 as already mentioned, attacked the Ricardo-Mill-McCulloch analysis on a broad front and with complete success. His Dissertation, which said, as far as fundamentals are concerned, practically all that can be said, must rank among the masterpieces of criticism in our field, and it should suffice to secure to its author a place in or near front rank in the history of scientific economics. Nor did his work pass unnoticed. Several writers, Read among them, acknowl- 15 That Senior arrived at this absurd result after a careful examination of facts. only makes matters worse, as far as his competence in applied theory is concerned. On the other hand, Marx’s scathing attack upon Senior’s argument in the first volume of Das Kapital does not enhance our idea of Marx’s competence either. In all the pages of vituperation that he bestowed upon it, he failed to adduce the decisive criticism, which he does not seem to have perceived. He overlooked also another thing, namely, that Senior’s argument would have been correct (at least in principle), if Marx’s own theory had been. The reasoning of both Senior and Marx may, however, give pause to those who refuse to recognize the advance in analytic technique that has occurred since. And the case also serves to illustrate another point that cannot be impressed upon the reader’s mind too often. The essential thing is that both Senior and Marx committed mistakes, revelatory of inadequate technique. These mistakes were mistakes quite irrespective of the cause for which they argued. To note that Senior was ‘for’ and that Marx was ‘against’ the mill owners is entirely irrelevant. And to blame the one and to praise the other, according to the side we take ourselves, is childish. 16 It was Professor Seligman’s paper ‘On Some Neglected British Economists’ (mentioned above), which drew my attention to Read; Dr. R.Opie’s paper (in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 1929) which drew my attention to Scrope, who until then had impressed me only by his contributions to monetary theory and policy; and Marx’s Theorien über den Mehrwert which drew my attention to Ramsay. Two important names, those of Jenkin and of Jennings, are being transferred to Part IV. Of course, West was quite typically one of those who ‘also ran.’ But it seemed better to couple him with Ricardo. 17 Samuel Bailey (1791–1870). The only publication of his that need be mentioned is A Critical Dissertation on the Nature, Measures and Causes of Value; chiefly in Reference to the Writings of Mr. Ricardo and His Followers (1825; London School Reprint, 1931). Perhaps I should add his reply to a grossly unfair criticism in the Westminster Review, ‘Letter to a Political Economist,’ 1826. Both in unfairness and lack of understanding of Bailey’s points, the Westminster reviewer was however outdone by Marx (Theorien über den Mehrwert). Review of the troops 461 . Since the writings of this group, which of course is entitled to a great place in the history of socialist thought, offer but little that is relevant to a history of economic analysis, we shall. History of economic analysis 460 the profits of cotton mills, assumed to be 10 per cent, would be completely wiped out by a reduction of the working day by one-eleventh because the whole of. program of Whitbread’s (cottages to be built by the parish authorities) on the ground that this would encourage History of economic analysis 456 For the public and also for a majority of the profession,