Economic essays

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1753623200

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-136107

Document type:: Monograph

Title:: Economic essays

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: Macmillan

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: viii, 368 S.; Ill., graph. Darst.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

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Title:: The malthusiad fantasia economica / James Bonar

Collection:: Economics Books

THE MALTHUSIAD: FANTASIA ECONOMICA 23 which saves the situation, and, whatever my critics may say, saves it without vice or misery.” Y. E.: “Mr. Malthus, if you had said all this ut first, would your book have made such a noise in the world? You get the credit of having roused civilized humanity from its visions of an Earthly Paradise by showing the existence of something in human nature fatal to all paradises. Writers before you had the idea of it in their brain, but you got it into other people’s bones.® You would hardly have done so, sir, if you had made all your corrections in the proofs of your first essay; you wisely kept them for the second.” SHADE: “My exaggeration was not intentional. I honestly did not see in 1798 what I saw in 1803. You speak of corrections. The introduction of moral restraint was the one important cor- rection. Corrections and additions are bound to be legion in every scientific inquiry. We get more and more of the truth as we go on, but all grows from the same root; there is no recantation of first principles. I am prepared to hear from you that the process had gone on in your day as in mine.” Y. E.: “I shall try to follow your well-known example, sir, and be polite even in telling of things disagreeable. The process as you describe it assuredly went on within your own book in the successive editions of it; and I take for granted that you know all about your critics till the 29th of December, 1834, when you left us. If you had been Professor at Cambridge instead of Haileybury for thirty years, lecturing not to cadets of the East India Company but to future professors, you might have founded something like a school. As it was, you reached the highly trained and learned and scientific men only through your books and their letters and occasional visits to you. Other economists, like Ricardo, got fruitful hints from you on Rent and less lucky ones on Wages and Value. You lived to see the Philosophical Radi- cals put you into their creed and calendar. You lived to see your maxims embodied for good or ill in a New Poor Law, 1834. You helped statisticians to draw together (in that same year) into a Statistical Society, and you will be glad to know that the sald Society still exists and occasionally studies Births, Mar- riages and Deaths just as you would have desired. You had * Stokes quoted by A. Schuster, Nature, Feb., 1925, p. 305, on the dis- covery of the Rontgen rays.

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