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439.: ricardo to mcculloch1[Answered by 474] - David Ricardo, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, Vol. 9 Letters 1821-1823 [1821]

Edition used:

The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa with the Collaboration of M.H. Dobb (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). Vol. 9 Letters 1821-1823.

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

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439.

ricardo to mcculloch1
[Answered by 474]

Gatcomb Park 8 July 1821

My Dear Sir

At Mr. Mushet’s request I write these 2 lines to say that he is busily employed in correcting his tables so as to render them correct in principle. You may expect he says to receive a copy of his New Edition in a fortnight or 3 weeks.—2

Your observations on the Report of the Agricultural Committee are excellent.3 I am much flattered by knowing that I fought hard against the principle of the first passage which you quote,4 but without success. Mr. Huskisson did not himself quite agree with its correctness but the difference between him and me is this, he would uphold agriculture permanently up to its present height—I would reduce it gradually to the level at which it would have been if the trade had been free, for I should call the trade free if wheat was subject to a permanent duty of 8/- pr. qr. to countervail the peculiar taxes to which Land is subject. You have not noticed the passage in Page 16 beginning with “Assuming, therefore,” nor in page 17—“They can however have no difficulty in stating” which are both very objectionable. There is a great inconsistency in Page 11 with the former part of the Report. We say “Taking therefore as the basis” &ca., here we say that steady prices are advantageous to the landlord, and we have before said that steady prices can only be obtained by permitting them to be low, and on a level with the prices of other countries—the conclusion then is that low prices are beneficial to landlords—to this I cannot agree—but I have not time now to write another word.

Yrs. truly

David Ricardo

[1 ]Addressed: ‘J. R. M’Culloch / Buccleugh Place / Edinburgh’.

MS in British Museum.—Letters to McCulloch, XXVII.

[2 ]It was this ed. that Mulloch reviewed; see above, VIII, 392.

[3 ]‘Report of the Agricultural Committee’, leading article in the Scotsman, 30 June 1821.

[4 ]In this passage the Committee suggest for the consideration of Parliament ‘whether a trade in corn, constantly open to all nations of the world, and subject only to such a fixed duty as might compensate to the grower the loss of that encouragement which he received during the late war from the obstacles thrown in the way of free importation, and thereby protect the capitals now vested in agriculture from an unequal competition in the home market,—is not, as a permanent system, preferable to that state of law by which the corn trade is now regulated. It would be indispensable, for the just execution of 5 July 1821 this principle, that such duty should be calculated fairly to countervail the difference of expense, including the ordinary rate of profit, at which corn, in the present state of this country, can be grown and brought to market within the United Kingdom, compared with the expense, including also the ordinary rate of profit, of producing it in any of those countries from whence our principal supplies of foreign corn have usually been drawn, joined to the ordinary charges of conveying it from thence to our markets.’ (‘Report from Committee on the Agriculture of the U.K.,’ 1821, p. 16.)—Scotsman’s italics.