The most extensive development of his con cepts naturally took place in England where he had written and where that industrialism which was most congenial to his views was the furthest advanced, but he was honored by reverent disciples in every important European state and in the United States. His most dis tinguished English disciples were Thomas Robert Malthus (176(-1834) ; David Ricardo (1772-1823) ; James Mill (1773-1836) ; John Ramsay McCulloch (1789-1864), and William Nassau Senior (1790-1864). The one thing which, in particular, distinguished the doc trines of Smith from those of his disciples was his greater optimism, a difference which may be explained by the great change in the economic environment in the interval which had elapsed. While the central importance of these writers was their elaboration of the in dividualistic hypothesis, each contributed some special interpretation of more or less origi nality ar4.d significance. Malthus held that remedial legislation was not only harmful as interfering with the natural order of things, but was also useless as far as any hope of im proving the poorer classes was concerned. He maintained that even though distribution were equalized no permanent good could result, be cause population tends to increase more rapidly than the means of subsistence, and this dis parity between population and available means of support would ultimately be restored and with it would come a return of poverty and misery. Through an excessive birthrate the proletariat created its own misery, and the only hope of permanent relief lay in the artifi cial control and restriction of the birthrate through the postponement of marriage. Ricardo paid particular attention to the subject of dis tribution. From the Physiocratic notion that the wages of agricultural laborers tend toward the minimum of subsistence and Malthus' doc trine of population he derived his famous "sub sistence theory of wages." According to this theory wages tend to that level which allows the laboring class to exist and perpetuate itself without either increase or decrease; hence the folly of legislation designed to enlarge the in come of the proletariat, for the resulting in crease of population would prevent any diminu tion of poverty and misery. Further, Ricardo attacked the landlords by maintaining that rent tended to absorb an ever greater share of the social income, and that their interests were op posed to those of all other economic classes. Finally, he laid the basis for the Marxiaii theory of value by holding that, within certain definite limitations, value is determined by the amount of labor invoked in production. James, Mill brought into economic liberalism the utilitarian philosophy of Bentham regarding the maximum good for the largest number, which Mill and his associates confidently believed to be attainable through the operation of the principles of economic liberalism. McCul loch was chiefly a systematizer of the principles of his school and was the most sympathetic member of the group toward the laboring classes, being a supporter of Place and Hume in the attempt to legalize trade-unionism. Senior represented the final and most extreme stage of economic liberalism through his attempt to perfect economics as a purely abstract and ob jective science and by his ardent opposition to even the mildest form of legislation beneficial to the laboring classes. While most of these writers took little active part in politics, their ideal "of perfect competition for the em ployers and subjection for the workers" was eagerly adopted by Cobden, Bright and other members of the "Manchester School" and the Liberal party in their effort to reduce the power and privileges of the landed aristocracy and to enforce and perpetuate the servile and helpless status of the laborers. Further, their notions were widely popularized, and their gen eral views were as much the order of polite conversation in British parlors as the Rous seaucan notions of the state of nature had been in the French salons of a half century before.
In France the doctrines of the later version of economic liberalism were espoused by a number of economists, the most notable of whom were Jean Baptiste Say (1767-1832) and Frederic Bastiat (1801-50). Say's position was very similar to that of Senior. He maintained that political economy was purely a descriptive science and not in any way a practical art. The economist should simply study and for mulate economic laws and should never usurp the functions of the statesman. Reversing the
position of the Physiocrats, he laid greatest stress upon the productivity of manufacturing, and he was the most enthusiastic of all the eulogists of the new era of mechanical in dustry. He was the French bourgeois economist of the period as Guizot was the statesman of this group. Bastiat revived the optimism of Adam Smith and, as an ardent admirer of Cobden, devoted his attention chiefly to an advocacy of free trade. The func tion of the state, he held, was solely to main tain "order, security and justice." So obsessed were Say and Bastiat over the importance of the manufacturing and commercial classes that many of their less scientific followers came to deny that poverty or misery existed.
In Germany economic liberalism was de fended by Johann Heinrich von Thiinen (1783 1850) and Karl Heinrich Rau (1792-1870), while in America Henry C. Carey (1793-1879) first introduced the classical political economy, though he differed from Smith's later support ers by reviving the optimism of Smith and at tacking the pessimism of Malthus. Moreover, i he advocated national protectionism in contrast to the free trade doctrines of the others of the school.
Though it will be evident that economic liberalism was as distinctly a capitalistic move ment as socialism has been a proletarian agita tion — that, as Cliffe Leslie expressed it, "they created a science for wealth rather than a science of wealth"— nevertheless it cannot be denied that their efforts accomplished much that was good. Before rational state-activity to solve the problems created by the Industrial Revolution could begin in an effective manner it was necessary that the antique rubbish of Mercantilism should be cleared away and this was the great contribution of the economic liberals and their political adherents, even though they offset much of the value of their destructive efforts by obstruction of subse quent progressive legislation. It should also be pointed out in passing that the economic liberals were aided by the contemporary philosophy of Romanticism, with its denial of the possibility of artificially accelerating the rate of political progress, and by the political individualism which had been set forth by Wil helm von Humboldt, and was later taken by John Stuart Mill in his earlier days and by Herbert Spencer. In England the more notable practical effects of economic liberalism were the growth of free trade, associated with the work of Huskisson, Cobden, Bright, Peel and Gladstone; the abolition of such archaic politi cal restrictions as the Test and Corporation Acts; the increase of the political powers of the middle class in the central and local gov ernment by the reform bills of 1832 and 1835; the abolition of slavery in the colonies through the efforts of Wilberforce and Buxton ; the re peal of the savage criminal code as a result of the work of Romilly, Mackintosh, Buxton and Peel; the development of a policy of pre ventive treatment in the handling of the prob lem of poor relief which was evident in the notable Poor Law of 1834; and the first antic ipation of a more liberal policy of imperial government through the leadership of Lord Durham and others. In France serfdom and the gild monopolies were abolished before the close of the 18th century; Guizot directed the Orleanist regime solely in the interests of the capitalists; and Bastiat's doctrines were able to win Napoleon III for free trade. In Prussia, Stein and Hardenburg were able to secure legislation looking toward the complete aboli tion of serfdom and gild monopolies and the development of municipal self-government. Following 1819 a more liberal economic and commercial policy was embodied in the famous Zollverein, the work of Maassen, Billow, Eich horn and Von Motz. Most of the other Ger man states followed Prussia in this liberalizing policy, and some, like Baden, quite outdistanced her in this respect. It will he apparent, how ever, that none of this legislation materially benefited the proletariat. Indeed, some of the legislation of this period was specifically de signed to paralyze all efforts of the laborers at self-improvement and the agitators for the abolition of negro slavery in the colonies passed by unnoticed a far worse type of slavery which existed at home among their own countrymen. Such a body of doctrine could not endure long unchallenged in the face of the growth of modern industrialism and the increasing misery of the proletariat.