530.: ricardo to mcculloch1[Answered by 541] - David Ricardo, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, Vol. 9 Letters 1821-1823 [1821]
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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.
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First published by Cambridge University Press in 1951. Copyright 1951, 1952, 1955, 1973 by the Royal Economic Society. This edition of The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo is published by Liberty Fund, Inc., under license from the Royal Economic Society.
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530.
ricardo to mcculloch
[Answered by 541]
London 8 July 1823
My Dear Sir
I hope you have reached your home in safety, and that you found all your friends in good health. I trust that you will not omit coming to us again next spring—we shall all be delighted to see you and shall be prepared to learn with docility all the good principles which you are to teach us. You have already done much for the good cause, and I have little doubt that you are destined to do much more.—We must endeavor to get some of the grown gentlemen in the House of Commons to attend your lectures, and to perfect themselves in the science for which there appears to be a growing taste.
I shall leave London for Gatcomb on monday next, I will thank you to give directions to the Newsman to send the Scotsman to me there.
My principal object in writing to you is to enclose the papers with which Mr. Tooke has furnished me respecting the Exchange with America—I hope you may find them useful for the object which you have in view. —
I am writing to you from a Comm̄ee room in the H of Commons and have only time to assure you that I am and ever shall be
Yrs. truly
David Ricardo
[McCulloch had been on a six weeks’ visit to London, during which time he had many discussions with Ricardo and his circle. (On this see below, p. 312.) A facetious account of one of these meetings is given by Mrs. Grote in a letter of 22 June 1823 to G. W. Norman: ‘Before I see you again...we shall be consigned over to the interminable controversy about the “measure of value.” The last discussion I heard on this most fertile subject was between Messrs. Ricardo, Mill, Grote, and McCulloch (of Edinburgh), in the “Threddle” [the Grotes’ house in Threadneedle Street], and after about one and a half hour’s laborious exertion (which, however, was not profitless), it was resolved to postpone any further argumentation sine die, Mr. McCulloch closing the debate with, “Wall, I think the quastion must be soobjacted to a more sevear anallasis before we shall arrive at a definitive conclusion.”’ (From George Grote’s Posthumous Papers, edited by Mrs. Grote, ‘for private circulation,’ London, 1874, p. 25.) See also the following letter, hitherto unpublished, which was written when McCulloch was about to return to Edinburgh.