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.