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Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 399.: mill to ricardo2[Answered by 400] - The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, Vol. 8 Letters 1819-June 1821

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399.: mill to ricardo2[Answered by 400] - David Ricardo, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, Vol. 8 Letters 1819-June 1821 [1819]

Edition used:

The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa with the Collaboration of M.H. Dobb (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). Vol. 8 Letters 1819-1821.

Part of: The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, 11 vols (Sraffa ed.)

About Liberty Fund:

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399.

mill to ricardo2
[Answered by 400]

Bentham has imposed upon me the task of begging you to try to recollect, what those papers consisted of which he lent to you on the subject of his annuitty notes.3 He has mislaid them. He wishes to know in particular whether the printed papers consisted of two Tables, or of three Tables—the third being the note, in the form intended to be issued—and besides the table, whether there were not two printed sheets, and the half of a third.

Please to answer me these questions as nearly and as expeditiously as you can. He is for making a present of his scheme to the Spanish Cortez, from whom he is in expectation of an invitation to make a code.1

I forget what were your objections to his notes, as a currency.

I wrote to you yesterday and have nothing to add.

Perry2 is working hard to get in the Whigs—but I am told the King is highly pleased with his ministers—and has thanked Lord Liverpool for his exertions.

[2 ]MS (in Mill’s handwriting) in R.P. It was found, with letter 389, in a bundle entirely made up of letters of Sept.–Dec. 1820.

[3 ]Bentham’s plan of ‘Circulating Annuities’, first published as ‘A Plan for saving all the Trouble and Expense in the Transfer of Stock, and for enabling the Proprietors to receive their Dividends without Powers of Attorney, or Attendance at the Bank of England, by the Conversion of Stock into Note Annuities’ in Works, ed. by Bowring, Edinburgh, 1843, vol. iii, pp. 105–53. Bowring notes: ‘The papers from which the following work is edited, were written by Bentham in 1800,—and the principal part of the first four Chapters then printed: the Editor has been able to discover only a single copy of those Chapters.’ A copy (F. Place’s) is in British Museum, 6025. d. 7 (1); it is headed simply Circulating Annuities, &c., and consists of 48 pp. and two folding tables, the second being the ‘Form of a proposed Annuity Note’.

[1 ]‘The Cortes of Spain in this year [1820], came, in fact, to a unanimous resolution to avail themselves of Bentham’s services in the preparation of codes of law for that country’ (Bowring, in Works of Bentham vol. x, p. 514).

[2 ]James Perry (1756–1821), editor of the Morning Chronicle.