Letters of David Ricardo to Thomas Robert Malthus, 1810-1823 Part 1

Letters of David Ricardo to Thomas Robert Malthus, 1810-1823.

by David Ricardo.

PREFACE.

The following Letters are printed for the first time from the original ma.n.u.scripts, kindly lent for the purpose by Colonel Malthus, C.B. The representatives of Ricardo have been good enough to make search for the corresponding letters of Malthus, but without success.

The Collection covers the whole period of the friends.h.i.+p of the two men.

What is of purely private interest (a very small portion) has, as a rule, been omitted. There is seldom any obscurity in the text; the handwriting of Ricardo is clear and good. The earlier letters have no envelopes. The breaking of the seal has frequently torn a page, and destroyed a word or two. In two cases we have nothing but the fragment of a letter. But fortunately the bulk of the series has reached us in a complete state.

These Letters were evidently known to Empson and MacCulloch, whose references to them are quoted in their proper place. Other letters of Ricardo, as well as his speeches in Parliament, are quoted here and there when they ill.u.s.trate the text or fill up a gap. The Correspondence with J. B. Say is given at some length, as it is probably little known to English readers.

The Outline of Subjects will be found to contain only a bare sketch of the main positions taken up by Ricardo against Malthus in these Letters.

It could not fairly be expanded into an account of both sides of the argument, for, when we are within hearing of only one of the disputants, we cannot with fairness believe ourselves to have the whole case before us. We cannot accept his statement of the terms of the discussion, for, though he had every desire to be just to his opponent, his cast of mind was so different that he can hardly be thought to have entered into his opponent's views with perfect sympathy[1].

These Letters indeed show on almost every page how completely the two economists differed in their point of view. Beginning in a deep mutual respect, their acquaintance with each other grew into a very close intimacy; but it was the friends.h.i.+p of two men entirely unlike in mental character. Ricardo admits that he had been deeply impressed by the Essay on Population (p. 107), but thinks that Malthus is apt to miss the true subject of political economy, the inquiry into the distribution of wealth, and to confine himself to production, of which nothing can be made (pp. 111, 175); Malthus seems to his friend to have too strong a practical bias (p. 96); instead of reflecting on the general principles that determine (for example) the Foreign Exchanges, he tries to get light from Jamaica merchants and City bullion dealers (p. 3, cf. 12); he buries himself in temporary causes and effects instead of looking to permanent ones (p. 127); he gains his point by a definition instead of an argument (p. 237) and, perhaps through the same practical bias, he is too much absorbed in questions of his own College (p. 125), and not eager enough for political reform (pp. 151, 152). Malthus, Cambridge Wrangler and Haileybury Professor, was free from any academical bias in favour of abstract thinking; he had in fact little of the typical University man except his love of boating (p. 158). Ricardo, a self-made and largely a self-educated man[2] (though he had neither the pride of the first nor the vanity of the second), had no traditions that were not mercantile, and made a large fortune on the Stock Exchange[3]. But, in his thinking, he was under no slavery to details; he was even conscious of a strong theoretical bias (p. 96). He was fonder of 'imagining strong cases' to elucidate a principle, than of adducing actual incidents to establish it (pp. 164, 167). The very narrowness of his programme enabled him (as later it enabled Cobden and his school) to seem to exhaust all the difficulties of the subject, and dispose of them by plain straightforward proofs. Malthus, who had a less acute logical understanding, but saw more clearly the real breadth and complexity of the subject, seemed often more faltering, and less consistent with himself.

Ricardo agreed with his friend in looking, on the whole, at the bright side of things, and forecasting prosperity for England even in the dark days of Luddites and Six Acts (pp. 139, 141). They were, both of them, unready writers, partly from deference to each other's criticism (pp.

20, 23, 117, 125, 155, 159, 207),--partly, in Ricardo's case, from awkwardness in composition, where he was always, in his own opinion, the worse man of the two (pp. 104, 108, 145, 208),--partly because the obscurity of the subject was felt by them to be inconsistent with dogmatic certainty (pp. 111, 176, 181). But they are free in their criticism; they never dream of allowing it to affect their good temper (pp. 175, 240), and they are never afraid to confess mistakes (pp. 20, 184, 207, 231, etc.).

Personally, they agreed in enjoying society and travel, in loving 'law and order' and hating 'a row' (pp. 64, 208), and in being nowhere so happy as in their family circle, in Ricardo's case a patriarchally large one (p. 146). The robust health of Malthus was not shared by his friend (p. 140), but the latter had more of the qualities of a public man, and in the House of Commons he was by no means a silent member. Their range of interests was perhaps equally wide, though Ricardo's bent was to natural science as Malthus' to mathematics. In politics they were both in favour of Parliamentary Reform. Francis Place[4], writing in 1832 to a correspondent who had reproached Political Economists with hostility to reform, says that the study tends almost necessarily to political enlightenment, and points to Malthus, Mill, Ricardo, and others in confirmation. 'Mr. Malthus' (he says) 'was an aristocratic parson when he first published his Essay on Population ... but in going on with his work and being obliged to study political economy, his prejudices gave way before principles, and he became the advocate so far as he dared of good government. His work contains irrefragable arguments for universal suffrage, which cannot be overlooked, but must be applied by every reader who understands the subject; and there are also in his work other indications of what you and I should call liberal principles[5].' For myself, Place adds, I have been 'a plain Republican for forty years;'

James Mill is 'as bad as myself.' As to Ricardo: 'He was one of the most enlightened of reformers I ever knew; he was a man who never concealed his opinions.' There is no doubt, from all the evidence, what these opinions were. Ricardo advocated a widely extended suffrage, frequent parliaments, and especially secret voting. In his speeches in the House of Commons, which are more than a hundred in number, from the first on the 25th March, 1819, to the last on the 4th July, 1823, he speaks his mind plainly not only on the Bank, the Sinking Fund, the currency, agriculture, the Poor Law, and the tariff, but on the reform of Parliament, retrenchment, freedom of the press and right of public meeting. His oratory seems in many respects to have resembled that of Cobden. The arguments were given with plain directness without elegance of diction; and they were brought home by matter-of-fact similes from every-day life or commercial experience. We know from Brougham that his manner of speaking was earnest, modest, genial, frank, and unaffected; and, as he only spoke on what he knew, he was always heard with attention[6], though his sentiments were unpalatable and he was usually in a hopeless minority.

Bentham claimed to be the spiritual grandfather of Ricardo[7], and Ricardo may have got his first thoughts on Politics from him and Mill, as on Economics from Adam Smith; he may also have caught from Bentham his habit of reasoning abstractly. But the arguments he uses on behalf of his political opinions are such as to leave the impression that he reached his politics through his political economy, the former being only the latter from a different point of view. He seems to construct his notion of a free government on the lines of his notion of a free trade. When he takes the unpopular side in the case of the Carliles[8], imprisoned for blasphemous libel, he is not unfairly described by Wilberforce as simply 'carrying into more weighty matters those principles of free trade which he has so successfully expounded' in other cases. His interest in popular education seems to spring from the desire that our people may be rightly equipped for industrial compet.i.tion. He attends a City dinner to the Spanish Minister at a time when the European Powers are threatening Spain, and appeals to the principle of Non-Intervention[9], thus antic.i.p.ating the Manchester School and applying _laissez faire_ on the large scale. He applies the same principles perhaps too abstractly in the case of the Spitalfield Acts[10], which made the wages of the silkweavers to be fixed by the Justices instead of by the 'higgling of the market,' and in the case of the Truck System[11], or payment of wages in kind; but there was much to justify his hostility to the first, and there was Robert Owen's successful use of something very like the Truck system in New Lanark to excuse his defence of the second. He had a statesman's willingness to accept part where he could not get the whole, and to welcome a compromise rather than no progress at all. He would not abolish the Corn Laws at a stroke, but would prepare our agriculturists for the change by lessening the duty on imports year by year till nothing was left but 10_s._ a quarter, to remain as a 'countervailing duty' roughly equal in amount to the peculiar burdens of the British agriculturist[12]. Some of his opponents called him a 'mere theorist'; but this is a common taunt of men who cannot render a reason against men who can. Even his disciple MacCulloch thinks that his investigations were 'too abstract to be of much practical utility[13].' But in his own hands they were not so abstract that they were divorced from practice, or unmodified by the needs of each case. Such measures as he recommended in the House were of great practical utility, and have nearly all been embodied in subsequent legislation; yet he founded them all on certain general principles which in the order of his thinking were economical first and political afterwards. As far as politics are concerned, we find the principles abstract simply because they are not in our own day the principles most needed in legislation.

In short, Ricardo's thinking was abstract only in the sense in which Bentham's was so. They had arrived, by a different road, at the same political philosophy. Ricardo had a fixed idea of the individual as being logically prior to society; and the interest of the community only meant to him the interest of a large number of individuals, the collection as a whole having no qualities not possessed by each of the parts, and there being no spiritual bond. Nature (which means in this case theory instead of history) begins and ends with individuals; Nature made the individuals, and Man made the groups. Ricardo agreed with Bentham that 'the community is a fict.i.tious Body, composed of individual persons who are considered as const.i.tuting, as it were, its Members. The interest of the community then is what? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it[14].' We find Ricardo arguing: 'Let me know what the state of men's interests is, and I will tell you what measures they will recommend;' and 'that State is most perfect in which all sanctions concur to make it the interest of all men to be virtuous,'

in other words, to promote the general happiness[15]. Now, to consider human beings as first and chiefly separate from one another and having a separate self-interest which rules their action, is certainly to reason abstractly. But this abstract reasoning of the Philosophical Radicals is due, in the case of the Economists among them, more to Adam Smith than to Bentham. Most of them, like Ricardo, had got not only their first economics but their first lessons in thinking, from the 'Wealth of Nations.' The 'Wealth of Nations' bore the stamp of that Individualism which we usually a.s.sociate with Rousseau. Its author had written, seventeen years before, a book in which he gave almost exclusive consideration to the common bond that unites man to man, the power one man has of putting himself by thought in the place of another, or (in a wide sense of the word) to sympathy. There is no need to suppose that Adam Smith had forgotten or recanted the 'Moral Sentiments;' but it is certainly the case that in the later and greater work, which became the text-book of Political Economy, he deliberately takes up another point of view, and presents men as dominated by private interest. With every allowance for his frequent qualifications ('upon the whole,' 'in many respects,' etc.), there is no doubt that he there considers 'the natural effort which every man is continually making to better his own condition' as a principle of growth and health which owes little or nothing to State or Society, but is continually transforming them and bringing good out of their evil. He is fully aware how industry in all its forms has been affected by the government and civilization of a people; but he regards industry itself, or the commercial ambition of the industrious cla.s.ses, as more potent still. As far as industrial progress is concerned, he would have said with Bentham that Nature begins and ends with individuals; in matters of trade he has no confidence in a.s.sociations of men, even when they are voluntary. To him, the really beneficent a.s.sociation is that unintended and unpreventible organization resulting from the division of labour, the separation of trades, and the uncontrolled movements of commercial ambition on the part of individual men. He is careful to say that Political Economy is not Politics[16]; but he insists that all political restraints and preferences must be taken away from industry, and 'the obvious and simple system of natural liberty' will 'establish itself of its own accord.' It is not surprising that this lesson in individualism was learned by his successors without the cautions with which the teacher would have surrounded it. The pupils unconsciously argued as if political individualism was part and parcel of economical principles, for it certainly seemed so in the one book of their teacher that they had been led to study; and, when Bentham made self-interest a leading principle of politics, Ricardo, to follow him, needed only to make clear to himself the underlying political basis of his economical ideas. In Malthus, economical individualism is held in check by a strong devotion to the principle of nationality, as well as by a wide range of philosophical and general interests. But to Ricardo political economy is all in all; the ruling principles of all his thinking are determined for him by the economical; and the result is individualism in politics as well as in political economy. The animosity of his critics is perhaps as often due to their strong dislike of this political philosophy underlying his doctrines, and derived through Adam Smith from Rousseau, as to any real or supposed abstractness of the doctrines themselves.

Ricardo's political work has therefore the merits and the defects of the theory of individualism and policy of _laissez faire_, which crowned its achievements with the Repeal of the Corn Laws and Navigation Acts. John Stuart Mill, who was bred an individualist, has left us in his writings a faithful reflection of the change which has pa.s.sed over English politics and English economics in the course of his lifetime, and which he himself welcomed with some misgivings. We have ceased to believe that the removal of obstacles is enough to secure the highest good either in government or in industry. But we must not deny that the Manchester School and its predecessors were indispensable in their own day.

It is sometimes said that in addition to the faults of his school, Ricardo had flaws of his own which were due to a certain strong bias of self-interest[17]. We might answer that his arguments must none the less stand or fall by their own logic. But there is no reason to suppose any bias in Ricardo except his peculiar character of mind and cast of thought. He had the intellectual interest of a reasonable man in getting the right instead of the wrong answer to a difficult question; and his selfish interest as a member of the 'propertied' cla.s.ses was not clear enough to be a snare to him. 'It would puzzle a good accountant' (he says in the House[18]) 'to make out on which side my interest predominated; I should find it difficult myself from the different kinds of property which I possess (no part funded property) to determine the question.' He could be chivalrous and even Quixotic on occasion. His best political friends[19] thought he was Quixotic when he proposed to levy a high property tax to pay off the National Debt: 'I should contribute any portion of my own property for the attainment of this great end if others would do the same[20].' There was chivalry in his praise of Cobbett's Letter to the Luddites[21]; Cobbett had given him abuse unmixed with any drop of generosity. We may therefore look in vain in Ricardo for any feeling of antipathy to landlords or any other body of men, though he spoke, as in duty bound, against landlords, bank directors, and all cla.s.ses of monopolists, whenever they stood in the way of urgent reforms. Like other men, he not improbably had a lurking partiality for what had been the main business of his working life. But in his writings and speeches he gives us not feelings but arguments, and arguments that cannot be dismissed as feelings in disguise.

In the purely economical works there is more of abstract theory than the author is ever fully aware. Not only did he as an individualist habitually regard men as separate competing atoms, and the desire of wealth as the permanent and dominant motive of men[22]; but he made his general statements too absolute. He sometimes guarded himself by saying (as he does in these Letters): What I am laying down is true over any considerable period of time; the causes to which I point are permanent; I allow that other causes may prevail for short intervals; temporary causes may seem to overrule the permanent ones; but I look to the final settlement. Nevertheless, he admitted more than once in the course of his career that he had stated the permanent causes too absolutely. The doctrine of Value is first presented by him as extremely simple,--the value of a thing depends on the labour employed in producing it. Then, as we go on, we find this is only true of 'the early stages of society before much machinery or durable capital is used,' while it is not meant to be true, even there, of objects that have a 'fancy' value, due purely to their scarcity. Next, we are told that in modern times the relative value of two things is affected by the proportions in which fixed capital and circulating enter into their production; if fixed capital enters more into one than into another, then a rise of wages will lower the value of the first, for it will lower the rate of profits, and, as there are more profits concerned in the first, the value of this first will fall in relation to the other. This is not all;--if two things are produced with a like amount of fixed capital, yet, if the durability of the capital is different, there will be more labour where there is less durability, and more profits where there is more durability; the things produced by the more durable fixed capital will be lowered in value by a rise in wages, which lowers the rate of profit; and so on, _mutatis mutandis_. In short, value is affected not only by labour, but by the wages of labour. To these concessions we may add the important change of view, which (as we know from these Letters) made MacCulloch tremble for the Ark of his Covenant[23]; we had heard nothing at first but the praise of machinery as lowering prices and increasing the general wealth; now we are reminded that the invention of it may for the time cause serious injury to the working cla.s.ses[24].

It is not difficult for men living two generations after Ricardo, and having (as he himself expressed it[25]) 'all the wisdom of their ancestors and a little more into the bargain,' to point out many unjustified a.s.sumptions, many ambiguous terms, and even many wavering utterances, in Ricardo's 'Principles,' in spite of their appearance of severe logic. The author's detached practical pamphlets were in those respects far more powerful than this volume of imperfectly connected essays on general theory. The flattering importunities of friends had induced an unsystematic writer to attempt a systematic treatise[26]. The cardinal doctrine, that of Value, is applied to only one cla.s.s of cases, and, even to that, with serious modifications. It was left for later economists, like Jevons in this country, and Menger and Bohm Bawerk in Germany, to take up the task of giving a theory of value that will embrace all cases of it, not excluding those objects that possess a value 'wholly independent of the quant.i.ty of labour originally necessary to produce them, and varying with the varying wealth and inclinations of those who are desirous to possess them[27].'

Malthus has left a clear statement of the points at issue between Ricardo and himself in the Quarterly Review for January, 1824. He contended against Ricardo that (1) Quant.i.ty of Labour is not the chief cause of Value, but (2) 'Supply and Demand' are more truly so described, while (3) Compet.i.tion of Capital, and not fertility of the soil, determines the rate of profits. But, in regard to the first, he hardly gives Ricardo sufficient credit for his large concessions. In regard to the second, he does not realize that supply and demand are vague terms which can only be made definite by a theory of value itself. In regard to the third position, if fertility of soil be translated productiveness of the staple industry, Ricardo's view seems nearer the truth than his own. The inadequacy of the whole discussion on this third head is largely due to the fact that economists had not then been pushed by Socialism into a thorough investigation of Profits and Interest. They were content to borrow these ideas from every-day commercial life, and treat them as given ultimate facts needing no explanation. They therefore never fully accomplished the very first task of Political Economy, to state the facts as they are, and a.n.a.lyse into its fundamental laws the existing industrial system of modern nations. Still less did they fulfil its second task, to estimate the relation of the industrial system to the larger social and political body in which it lives and moves and has its being. The peculiar wants and motives of an individual people, changing, as they do, with the growth of civilization, must be viewed in their effects upon the production and distribution of the national wealth, if the truth about the latter is to be fully known. It is because the older economists did not attempt this that their discussions, carried on even by their most eminent representative men, seem to later readers superficial and unreal. But in their Economics, as in their Politics, they had their own work and not ours to do; and we must not blame them for not answering questions that have only very recently occurred to ourselves.

OUTLINE OF SUBJECTS.

In only two cases do the letters of this collection form groups that have a subject of their own not discussed at any length in the other letters. Letters I to XIV are the only ones that discuss at any length the influence of the Depreciation of the Currency on the Foreign Exchanges. Letters LXXVIII to Lx.x.xVIII are the only ones that so discuss the Measure of Value. After these the nearest approach to continuity is perhaps in Letters LXXI to LXXVII, when Over-production is the chief subject. But the discussion of Rent, Wages and Profits is not conducted by chapters as in a book; it follows the course of conversations which were not recorded, and obeys suggestions that are given in replies lost to us. We cannot hope to make the propositions on these three heads fall into a consecutive logical series.

The following a.n.a.lysis of the letters is not meant to be exhaustive.

Ricardo's opinions on the Bank of England (x.x.xV, etc.) and on the East India College (XL, etc.), for example, will not be found in it. It is simply a statement of the chief economical arguments.

In the early letters the correspondence turns chiefly on matters made prominent at the time (1810 seq.) by the Bullion Committee and Ricardo's own pamphlet, 'The High Price of Gold Bullion.' Though this pamphlet did not appear in its separate form till early in 1810, the matter of it had been published by Ricardo in a series of letters to the 'Morning Chronicle' beginning in September, 1809. These letters brought their author into public notice, and they seem to have led Malthus to seek his acquaintance. The earliest letters (of which Letter I in this collection was clearly not the first of the whole correspondence) were naturally on the subjects that first brought the two men together.

Ricardo's main positions as against Malthus are as follows:--

1. The amount of the currency of a nation is determined for it not simply by its size and population but by the nature and extent of its trading transactions; and yet, when these elements are given, the currency of one nation will stand to the currency of another in some ascertainable normal proportion, to alter which is to alter the relative value of the currencies affected (VI, VII, X).

2. Such events as a bad harvest, a change in articles of consumption or the transmission of a subsidy abroad, will, by altering the relative value of our currency, produce effects on the exchanges which, apart from their own specific remedy, are permanent, not transitory (I, VII, X).

3. An increase in the amount of gold and silver in a country will lead to an increased use of these metals for general purposes rather than to a proportionate fall in their value, there (II, III).

4. An increase in the value of a nation's exports and imports may involve no increase of its wealth or its capital, but may be due to a mere change from one set of articles of consumption to another, or to a carrying trade with foreign capital (IV).

5. In any case, such an increase is not the cause, but the effect of a change in the currency; it is a sign that money is going from where it is cheap to where it is dear (IV, VI, IX, cf. XII and XVII), and the Exchanges are an accurate measure of the difference (VII).

6. There has certainly been an increase of wealth in our own country in recent years, but it has not necessarily been accompanied with an increased rate of profits (V, cf. XX).

In Letters XV to XXI the following are the chief propositions:--

1. Restrictions on the importation of corn by keeping up the price of necessaries have a tendency to lower profits (XV), unless, indeed, they are followed by a great reduction of capital (XVI, XVII).

2. The only cause of permanently high or low profits is the facility of procuring necessaries, for on that mainly depends the rate of wages (XVI, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, cf. V, and for qualification LXXIX, Lx.x.x).

3. Other causes, such as bad harvests, new taxation, changes in demand, or excessive acc.u.mulation, are merely temporary (XX, XXI, cf. Ricardo's Pol. Econ. and Tax., ch. vi. 'On Profits').

4. Improvements in agriculture or machinery by increasing productiveness permanently increase profits (XX, cf. V and XXIII).

To these may be added--

5. Consumption and acc.u.mulation equally promote demand, and are both of them ineradicable tendencies of our nature, the one adding to our enjoyments, the other to our power (XIX).

6. Acc.u.mulation increases not only production, but consumption (XXI).

7. It is worth while to establish the truth of a principle, even if we cannot establish its utility (XXI).

In Letters XXIII to LXVIII, and in LXXVIII to Lx.x.x, the positions are as follows:--

1. By importing cheap foreign corn the public saves the whole difference in price (XXIII, XXIV).

2. It must be allowed that the prices of articles, besides varying with the amount of necessary labour bestowed on them, vary with the value of their raw material (XXV).

3. Apart from changes in the currency, a rise in the price of corn and a fall in the corn wages of labour, would be a contradiction (XXVI).

4. It follows from the principle of Population that the rate, as distinguished from the amount, of agricultural production, grows not greater, but less, when the increase of population drives agriculture to the cultivation of poorer soils (XXVII, XXVIII, cf.

XLIX).

5. This means that the whole cost in corn will be greater in proportion to the whole produce of corn, and, though the whole cost in money may be less in proportion to the whole produce in money, the rate of profits from farming will fall (XXIX).