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Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 418a.: ricardo to miss bayley1 - The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, Vol. 11 General Index

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418a.: ricardo to miss bayley1 - David Ricardo, The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, Vol. 11 General Index [1810]

Edition used:

The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo, ed. Piero Sraffa with the Collaboration of M.H. Dobb (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005). Vol. 11 General Index.

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

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


418a.

ricardo to miss bayley1

My Dear Miss Bayley

I shall be happy to forward your letters whenever you will favor me with them;—that which you enclosed to me this morning was immediately after I received it despatched by the 3d post to its address.—I promise to do this, or any other kindness in my power for you, although I should not be flattered by the account of such favorable opinions as Mr. Corrie expressed of my arguments in favor of my own doctrines on the disputed points in Political Economy. In truth however I am pleased that they had some effect on him.

You will like to know what Mr. McCulloch said of my notes. He thinks that I should not publish them in their present form—they are in his opinion too controversial, and although he considers them as establishing the doctrine of the effects of accumulation on the ground on which I had previously placed it, before Mr. Malthus wrote his work, he thinks I should lower my reputation if I became a commentator of every erroneous opinion which I might think I discovered in the writings of another political economist.1

I shall therefore I think proceed no further with the notes. They are now in the possession of Mr. Malthus and if they have any influence with him in inducing him to make corrections in his next edition they will not have been written in vain.

Pray give our united regards to Mrs. and Mr. Smith and Miss Mary Ann Bayley,2 and accept them yourself from our family circle. I hope you will hear good accounts of your sister Anne.

Yrs with great esteem

David Ricardo

[1 ]MS in the Houghton Library, here printed by permission of the Harvard College Library. I am indebted to Professor Frank W. Fetter for calling my attention to it.

Ricardo had met the Bayley sisters, Sarah, Elizabeth and Ann, at Easton Grey, the home of Thomas Smith. See above, X, 350 & n.

[1 ]See McCulloch’s letter of 22 Jan., above, VIII, 338–40.

[2 ]Probably to be identified with the “Miss Mary Ann” of Ricardo’s letter of 20 April 1822, above, X, 164–6.