his family consumes, he must now pay four guineas, plus eightpence, instead of four pounds. Say that his household were of four and a half heads, here (under the usual random computation of eight bushels annually per head) we have four and a half times four shillings and eightpence extra, - that is, precisely one guinea extra on the man's annual outlay; whilst, upon the table of Ricardo, his relief proceeds no further than by 14s., i. e. two thirds of his loss. This, besides, in the case B; but, if such things happen in the green ear, what will happen on the full harvest of development under C, D, E, and quarters of the alphabet still more ominous? By any law that Ricardo impresses on his student, the very wheels of the social watchwork must be clogged and motionless long before the land-scale would come in sight of detestable м, or even of gloomy H. Only through that great antagonist force for ever at work in Great Britain, — through skill, capital, and the energy of freemen; only by an antagonist law for ever operative in throwing back the descents, in raising the soil of case E, in the year 1700, to the level of B as it was in 1500,- the soil of o, in the year 1800, to the level of E as it stood in 1600, thus, and only thus, do we escape, have escaped, and shall escape, the action of rent; which action, by the just exposures of Ricardo, tends always to engulf us; which action, by the unjust concealments of Ricardo, ought long ago to have frozen us into a dead lock, anything to the contrary, notwithstanding, which has ever been insisted on by that great master of economy. The tendencies of a natural law like that of rent, (which word rent I use as a shorthand expression for the case, otherwise it is not rent, but the cause of rent, or degraduation of soils, which in very truth is the original principle of movement,) these tendencies it is always right to expose; and Ricardo first did expose them. Others had

discovered the law; he first applied his sagacious sense to its consequences upon profits, wages, price; and, through them, upon universal economy. That was right; for that we are irredeemably his debtors. But it was not right to keep studiously out of sight that eternal counter-movement which tends, by an equivalent agency, to redress the disturbed balance. This concealment has the effect of introducing marvels into a severe science; since, else, what other than a miracle is it that rent has not long ago absorbed the whole landed produce, -a result to which so manifestly it tends? Secondly, this concealment withdraws from the notice of young students a truly philosophic instance, or case, of that providential benignity which meets every natural growth of comprehensive evil by a commensurate compensation, or else by a process of positive counteraction. Our own social system seems to harbor within itself the germ of our ruin. Either we must destroy rent, i. e. that which causes rent, or rent will destroy us, unless in the one sole case where this destroying agency can be headed back uniformly as it touches the point of danger,—that point where it would enter into combination with evil co-agencies. Now this great case of reservation, this saving clause, (which by the intervention of an 66 "unless," i. e. of an if not," entitled, of course, to the benefits of a Shakespearian "if" defeats a dreadful tendency always lying couchant in our social mechanism,) being almost unnoticed by Ricardo, or not finding a systematic locus in his exposition, besides leaving room for a sort of wonderment not creditable to a severe science, has the further bad effect of inviting a malignant political disaffection. Both in France, Germany, and England, a dreadful class is forming itself of systematic enemies to property. As a wild, ferocious instinct, blind as a Cyclops and strong as a Cyclops, this anti-social frenzy has natu

rally but too deep a root in the predispositions of hopeless 'poverty. And it happens (though certainly not with any intentional sanction from so upright a man as David Ricardo) that in no instance has the policy of gloomy disorganizing Jacobinism, fitfully reviving from age to age, received any essential aid from science, excepting in this one painful corollary from Ricardo's triad of chapters on Rent, Profit, and Wages. A stress lies on this word triad; for it is not from insulated views of rent that the wicked inference arises: it is by combined speculations upon the three. Separate, the doctrine of rent offers little encouragement to the anarchist; it is in connection with other views that it ripens into an instrument of mischief the most incendiary. Since Ricardo's time, the anti-social Jacobins, -attacking, in France, the whole theory of taxation, of public worship, of national education; in England, attacking the fabric of civil administration, the liability of one generation to the debts or civil obligations of another, the right to property or to accumulations of any kind; and, in Germany, going far beyond these insanities of licentiousness - find often a convenient policy in having exoteric and minor degrees of initiation. To the aspirant, during his novitiate, they preach the abolition of entails, of regal courts, of ambassadors, and privileged bodies of soldiery, as appendages of courts; but on no phasis of the social economy now prevailing, do they dwell with more effectual bitterness than on the tendencies of rent as exposed by Ricardo. Here is a man, they argue, not hostile to social institutions, nor thinking of them in connection with any question of elementary justice, who reveals as a mere sequel, as an indirect consequence, as a collateral effect from one ordinary arrangement of landed property, that it does, and must encroach steadily, by perpetual stages, upon other landed claims, through all varieties of

kind and of degree. The evil, they allege, is in the nature of an eclipse; it travels by digits over the face of the planet. A shadow of death steals gradually over the whole disk of what once had offered a luminous field of promise. And that which was meant for the auspicious guarantee of indefinite expansion to human generations, viz. the indefinite expansibility of food and clothing from the land, becomes the main counteraction of these purposes of Providence, and the most injurious monument of social misarrangement. The class of landlords, they urge, is the merest realization of a scriptural idea,— unjust men reaping where they have not sown. They prosper, not pending the ruin, not in spite of the ruin, but by the ruin of the fraternal classes associated with themselves on the land. Not by accident, but by necessity, not by intermitting effects of position, but by very coercion of their original tenure,—it is the organic function of rent-receivers to encroach, to engulf all the shares at last, and to approximate this consummation of total absorption by yearly stages of partial absorption; like Schiller's cannon-ball,

Shattering what it reaches, and shattering that it may reach."

And thus, whilst universal society is viewed as the victim of institutions, yet this fatal necessity is received as no plea for those whom it coerces; but the noblest order of men amongst us, our landed aristocracy, is treated as the essential scourge of all orders beside. Now, were all this true, God forbid that it should be charged upon Ricardo as an offence to have exposed it! But it is the little learning here, as elsewhere, which grounds the ignorance and propagates the calumny. No man could know this better than Ricardo. And yet he has suffered these perilous falsehoods (perilous, because fatally "simular" of truth) to accredit themselves upon his authority. These pestilent

errors, oftentimes preached by dull men, have borrowed wings and buoyancy from his profound truths unfortunately mutilated. For the whole truth, when not one hemisphere, but both hemispheres are exhibited at once, is, that logically speaking, rents are themselves inevitable consequences, bound up with the necessities of the case; secondly, that, as inevitable results, these increments upon land import no blame to landlords, seeing that under any system of civil interests, and any administration of those interests, such increments eternally arising must be enjoyed by somebody; thirdly, that having thus reduced the question to a simple case of comparison between country gentlemen (as the most ordinary class of rent receivers) and any other assignable receivers, Ricardo was too conscientious to pretend that this class was not, amongst us, one of our noblest. If we have led Europe in political counsels since 1642; if we first founded a representative government, by whom else than our country gentlemen, in Parliament assembled, were we ourselves guided?

But, fourthly, Ricardo is chiefly blamable as overlooking that great pursuing counter-agency which travels after the tendency on land, overtakes it continually, and once at least in each century, like an annus Platonicus, restores the old relations of our system. Ricardo knew, in that extent which made it a duty to proclaim, that to this indefinite expansion of rent, absolutely unlimited as it is by original tendency, on that very argument, and merely by that proof, some active and commensurate remedy must have always been operating. Too evidently the evil must have found or have generated its own check, else why had it not long ago destroyed us? I have made it a point to dwell a little on this great question, because here chiefly it is that political economy inosculates with politics and the philosophy of social life; and because, from mere inad