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Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 429.: mcculloch to ricardo1 - The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, Vol. 8 Letters 1819-June 1821

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429.: mcculloch to ricardo1 - 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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429.

mcculloch to ricardo1

My dear Sir

Eight or ten days since I forwarded to Colonel Torrens a copy of my article on Machinery2 which I desired him to hand over to you—I hope my manner of stating the argument has met with your approbation—Are you aware whether Mr. Malthus means to alter any of his conclusions in his new Edition?3 If he does not he will deserve a much severer castigation than any he has hitherto met with—What he says about accumulation is absolutely disgraceful—He has it so mixed up, involved, and diluted that it is not easy for an ordinary reader to know what he would be at, but when attentively examined its rottenness is quite apparent—A very stupid book has lately appeared here in which some parts of your great work are attacked4 —I would have answered it had I not thought it might perhaps have disturbed the quiet transit of the work to the pastry and the snuff shop—I hope you approved of the greater part of the article in the Scotsman on the reduction of the standard5 —Excuse the liberty I take in sending you the enclosed1 and believe me to be with the greatest regard

Yours most faithfully

J. R. McCulloch

[1 ]Addressed: ‘David Ricardo Esquire / M.P. / Upper Brook Street / London’. London postmark, 26 April 1821.

MS in R.P.

[2 ]See above, p. 366, n. 2.

[3 ]See above, p. 373.

[4 ]Probably John Craig, Remarks on some Fundamental Doctrines in Political Economy; Illustrated by a Brief Inquiry into the Commercial State of Britain, since the Year 1815, Edinburgh, Constable, 1821. Advertised by the publisher in the Scotsman, 21 April 1821. There is in R.P. a bill of Geo. Greenland, bookseller, charging Ricardo 7s., on 11 June 1821, for ‘Craig’s Pol. Econmy’.

[5 ]‘The Proposed Reduction of the Standard of the Currency considered as a Means of Relieving the Public Distresses’, Scotsman, 14 April 1821. Mulloch in this article attacks Baring as ‘the great patron of the scheme for degrading the standard of the currency’ and rejects this proposal as involving ‘the robbery of...the private creditors’; but he still advocates his own plan for reducing the interest on the National Debt (see above, VII, 93, n. 2).

[1 ]Probably a letter to be franked.