PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 583 
mention conservative philosophers like Coleridge, had entertained as to whether a 
purely manufacturing policy would turn out in the long run to be safe could be 
contemptuously dismissed; and the literary dignity of John Mill’s book did 
much to secure its hold on respectful attention. Those who were drawn to a 
more generous attitude towards the labouring population and a nobler conception 
of society than were congenial to the first generation of economists found much 
to appeal to them in the moving passages which Mill wrote under the influence 
of Comte and the Socialists. It was as yet hardly realised that such passages had 
no natural place in the body of orthodox teaching. 
There were not wanting during this long period of half a century currents of 
European thought which might have been expected to disturb the complacency 
of English economics. But these currents never made their way into England. 
For the failure of each of them there is perhaps some explanation. Comte’s 
criticism of political economy (1839-42) was associated with a destructive 
philosophy of religion, and with a personality singularly alien to any usual 
English type. That Le Play’s method of family monographs and workmen’s 
budgets should have had to wait to our days before it called forth imitation in 
England is harder to explain; but that may also have been due to the association 
of a method of economic investigation with a large philosophy of religion and 
society, very different from that of Comte, but, like Comte, speaking a dialect 
foreign to Hnglish ears. The creators of the German ‘historical’ school of 
economists—Roscher (1843), Hildebrand (1848), Knies (1853)—had no such 
associations to hamper them, and in their own country their influence quietly | 
spread over the Universities and among the official classes. But the period was 
one marked in England by an almost complete ignorance of contemporary German 
thought. It was indeed the time of Germany’s humiliation; and I suppose the 
victories of 1870 did more to make us learn German than any spontaneous 
enlargement of interests. 
I began by saying that the Ricardian orthodoxy is, by general consent, to all 
intents and purposes dead to-day among English-speaking economists. By that, 
of course, I do not mean that there are not even yet portions of their writings 
that are still valuable ; but that what the Ricardians themselves regarded as the 
most vital part, the part which they frequently identified with political economy 
as a whole, the part which lent itself to practical conclusions in the sphere of 
taxation—that is to say, the doctrine of distribution—is no longer held (with the 
dubious exception of the doctrine of rent) in any shape which they would 
themselves have recognised. Its abandonment has been due to a series of assauits 
from several quarters and on different parts of the fabric, which occupied little 
more than the decade 1870-80. They were all, immediately if not ultimately, 
from English directions ; they were all, not from outside humanitarians, but from 
professed economists; aud some of them were from men who had no sort of 
realisation of the damage they were doing to an edifice they supposed themselves 
to be propping up. It will be enough to mention them in order. In 1869 John 
Mill threw over his disciples and renounced the wage-fund doctrine, giving hardly 
a thought to the security of what remained.» In 1871 Jevons produced his 
quasi-mathematical theory, the effect of which was to show, as he declared, 
how ‘that able but wrong-headed man Dayid Ricardo shunted the car 
of economic science on to a wrong line, a line on which it was further urged 
towards confusion by his equally able and wrong-headed admirer John: Stuart 
Mill.’ In 1874 Cairnes ‘newly expounded’ ‘some leading principles of political 
economy’ in a way which, while ‘not in any sense antagonistic towards the 
science built up by the labours of Adam Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, and Mill,’ 
aimed at showing that, ‘as at present generally received, it contained ‘no small 
proportion of faulty material.’ In 1876 Bagehot began a series of articles which 
were intended to rehabilitate orthodox economics—among other ways by returning 
to the narrowness of its scope before the younger Mill tried in vain to widen it, 
but with the result, in many minds, of still further discrediting it. In 1877 the 
American economist Francis Walker produced a new and far-reaching doctrine 
of wages. In 1879 Cliffe Leslie's collected essays introduced the English reader 
