My dear Sir,
I beg to remind you that the first Saturday in the next month is to-morrow se'n-night, on which day or a few days before it, I hope to have the pleasure of seeing you in Brook Street. We have a bed always at your service, and I wish you would make the rule invariable to take up your lodging with us whenever you visit London.
I hope you have quite determined to extend your new edition to another volume, and that you are now making great progress in it. I wish much to see a regular and connected statement of your opinions on what I deem the most difficult and perhaps the most important topic of political economy, namely, the progress of a country in wealth, and the laws by which the increasing produce is distributed.
Have you seen Torrens' Letter to Lord Liverpool[127]? He appears to me to have adopted all my views respecting profits and rent; and, in some conversation which I had with him a few days ago, he unequivocally avowed that he was now of my opinion, that the price of labour, arising from a difficulty in procuring food, did not affect the prices of commodities. He confessed that his former view on that subject was erroneous. I should be glad to see all the arguments in favour of my view of the question clearly and ably stated. I should not wonder if Torrens undertook it.
The sale of my last pamphlet has far exceeded its merits. Murray is printing a second edition[128]. I had no idea that the subject was of much interest to the public, but it seems that they are curious about the amount of the Bank treasure. In the House of Commons the defence of the contracts with the Bank was very little satisfactory; they endeavoured to fix the attention of the House on what the public had got and saved by the operations of the Bank; they seemed to think that all the rest belonged of right to the Bank.
Will Ministers be able to carry the Income Tax[129]?
Very truly yours,
David Ricardo.
Note.—Torrens came nearest to fulfilment of the above forecast in his 'Essay on the Production of Wealth' (1821), which was announced as 'a general treatise upon Political Economy, combining with the principles of Adam Smith so much of the more recent doctrines as may be conformable to truth and embodying the whole into one consentaneous system.' (Pref. p. v.) But he thinks out the subject vigorously for himself; and, though in all his later books he extols Ricardo above all his contemporaries, he finds frequent occasion to differ from him. Indeed he occasionally claims that Ricardo is the borrower, and he the lender. Ricardo, for example, is indebted to him (he says) for the doctrine that, when a nation has great advantage in one production but a much greater advantage in another, it will confine itself to producing the latter, and will even import the former (Ricardo, Works, pp. 76, 77; cf. Torrens, Preface to Essay on External Corn Trade, p. vii). Yet the doctrine has always passed as Ricardian par excellence (see e.g. Cairnes, Leading Principles of Political Economy, Part III. ch. i. p. 371, and Logical Method, p. 81), and we should not guess, from Letter XLVII for example, that Ricardo was the convert. The Preface to the 'Production of Wealth' ends with the prediction that in twenty years' time there would be unanimity amongst Economists on all fundamental principles.
XLV.
London, 5 March, 1816.