580 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 
than against them; his general mental attitude was still so largely that of the 
utilitarian circle that he might be counted upon to do the Ricardians full justice. 
If anyone still doubts whether there really was such a thing as an orthodox body 
of economic doctrine, the doubt can be quickly resolved by reference to Leslie 
Stephen’s pages. 
Few things are more remarkable in the history of thought than the rapidity 
with which the Ricardian economics secured its dominion over public opinion, 
Adam Smith had laid the foundation in the assumption of free competition ; 
Malthus had absolutely reversed the ideas of social philosophers on the subject of 
population. But neither in 1776 nor in 1798 was the man or the time ready for 
a ‘system. The creative period came a good deal later; it hardly extends 
beyond the decade from 1810 to 1820. Towards the end of that decade, in 1817, 
Ricardo’s book rose above the torrent of controversial pamphlets, and almost at 
once the edifice was complete. The doctrine of rent which Ricardo championed 
furnished a centre round which the other doctrines could group themselves ; while 
the conception of natural law—taken over by the Physiocrats long before from 
contemporary philosophy, learnt from the Physiocrats by J. B. Say, and now, 
through Say, impressed anew on Ricardo and his associates—gave to the new 
tenets a superhuman sanction. For if the word ‘religion’ has any meaning, we 
must recognise that political economy was, in a very real sense, one of the new 
religions of that wonderful era of fermentation. As early as 1821 the ‘ deposit’ of 
doctrine was complete; it only remained to propagate it. And this completion 
of the system is indicated by two events. One was the foundation of the 
Political Economy Club; the other, the publication of James Mill’s ‘ Elements.’ 
The Political Economy Club was the assembly of the elders of the new Church, 
and its rules breathe all the spirit of ecclesiastical fervour. The ‘ just principles 
of political economy’ are assumed to be already discovered ; the members bind 
themselves to procure their ‘diffusion.’ They declare it to be their duty ‘to 
watch carefully and to ascertain if any doctrines hostile to sound views on 
political economy have been propagated’; they undertake ‘to avail themselves 
of every favourable opportunity for the publication of seasonable truths.’ James 
Mill’s manual is even more symptomatic of the stage which political economy 
was believed by its adepts to have reached. Political economy, it takes for 
granted, is already a ‘science’ whose ‘ essential principles’ are known, and need 
only to be ‘ detached from extraneous topics’ and ‘ stated in their logical order.’ 
What shows, perhaps, best of all how completely all hesitation has passed 
away from the mind of its author is the fact that the work is avowedly designed 
to be a ‘school-book,’ addressed to ‘persons of either sex of ordinary under- 
standing ’"—the first, in fact, of those manuals by which young people have been 
turned into prigs before their time. And it was James Mill, we are coming 
more and more to realise, who did more than any other one man, first to 
impel Ricardo to write, and then to systematise the new faith and organise its 
propaganda. 
How rapidly that propaganda was successful! In 1821 Ricardian political 
economy was the creed of a part only of ‘a small and very unpopular sect,’ the 
Utilitarians, which ‘excited antipathy on all sides.’ Its teaching, we may recall, 
was received with repugnance and protest by the man of that age who saw most 
deeply into the human soul—I mean, of course, Wordsworth —as well as by 
Doleridge, who was beginning to teach his countrymen a truer philosophy of 
history. And yet in another ten years it had won wide acceptance, and had 
become the dominant force in social legislation. What Coleridge said in 1832 
of the Malthusian foundation was true by that time of the system generally ; it 
had ‘ gotten complete possession of the leading men of the kingdom,’ 
It would occupy us too long, and it might suggest a controversy I should wish 
to avoid, if I sought to furnish a complete explanation of this remarkable and 
rapid success. We should probably all agree that the system owed its general 
acceptance less to its intellectual merits—for when have great political forces 
been set moving by sheer weight of argument ?—than to its singular appropriate- 
ness to contemporary conditions. It appealed both to the good and to the evil 
