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