Full text: Economic essays

26 ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK 
themselves Eugenists, faintly foreshadowed by you in your quota- 
tion from the Tatler about Maud the Milkmaid. They would 
perpetuate good strains of population by inheritance. The quality 
of the population rightly seems to them more important than the 
quantity. You were a Utilitarian, Sir, but I seem to remember 
passages in your Essay showing that Greatest Happiness need 
not mean greatest numbers, but might be secured by smaller 
numbers of higher quality. It is open to question whether the 
great men or the great masses should matter most to a lover of 
his country.” 
SHADE: ‘Strange that a small man like me (small in mental 
stature) should have got a hearing at all, still less should have left 
his mark on great men and movements. I feel, si parva licet 
componere magnis, as Shakespere’s Henry VIII must have felt 
when told of the Great Elizabeth to come after him.” 
Y. E.: “Measured by influence, Sir, you are not a small man; 
and like Darwin you have added an adjective to the English 
language. You are not in Westminster Abbey, for no mere 
economists are there; but pilgrims have gone to Bath Abbey for 
your sake.” 
SHADE: “You speak of influence. Apart from the Essay, I 
should have thought to survive by a subdued influence on my dear 
Ricardo and his followers, not by any influence on science at 
large, still less by public fame. Ricardo was a very brother, 
and we might have agreed altogether if we had lived long enough 
together. As it was, he and his followed what I considered 
devious ways.” 
Y. E.: “Yes, I remember your solemn indictment of them in the 
Quarterly Review, 1824; and the course of time has turned 
the tables on that ‘New Political Economy.” A Classical School, 
of your type rather than theirs, might have lasted longer than 
theirs, for theirs cannot be said to have lasted very long.” 
SHADE: “I think you will find my tables not so easy to turn 
as theirs. The observers of my rules are on the whole more than 
the breakers thereof. My warnings against partial remedies 
for excessive population are probably standing; emigration, for 
example, and a potato diet did not go to the root of the matter.” 
Y. E.: “The last had a tragic exposure in an Irish Famine ten 
years after your death. But the relation of the Classical School 
to labour was in your system very much what it had been in the
	        
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