By 1798 many of the evil effects of the Industrial Revolution were showing themselves and unemployment, poverty and dis ease were already problems that called for remedial treatment. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) had his attention directed to these evils while discussing a socialistic scheme of William Godwin and wrote his °Essay on the Principle of Populations to refute such utopian cures. In this he held that population tends to increase faster than the means of subsist ence; that this tendency is restrained only by certain °positives checks in the form of fam ine, disease and war, or by a °preventives check in the shape of moral restraint, such as the postponement of marriage. Any social istic society, he therefore held, in which there was universal well-being and in which these checks did not operate, would be speedily broken down by his single principle of pop ulation. Malthus' essay has given rise to an enormous amount of discussion and had an important practical influence in the attitude of economists and others to various schemes of social reform. His principle of population must be held to have stated an important truth, though it was not original with Malthus and was greatly exaggerated by this writer and his followers.
Ricardo.— David Ricardo (1772-1823), an other follower of Smith, is best known for his theory of rent. While this was not original with him it was so fully developed in his
to the theory of money, to which subject his rigidly deductive method and his analytical skill were well adapted. In this respect his influence was unfavorable, for economic method was for many years diverted from the combination of inductive and deductive rea soning employed by Adam Smith to a purely deductive one. A false impression of accu racy and finality was thus given to economic ry.
Perhaps no writer went further than did Nassau William Senior (1790-1864) in nar rowing the scope of political economy and treating it as an abstract science. His name is usually associated with the abstinence theory of interest, which was his contribution to eco nomic thought. Ricardo had stated that the value of goods was fixed by their labor cost, but Senior pointed out that cost of production includes the "abstinence" of the capitalist in saving his capital for production, for which he must be rewarded. His new term was some what unfortunate because negative in meaning, but his emphasis of the contribution of capital to production constituted a real advance in theory. Most of the other English writers between Ricardo and John Stuart Mill were of minor importance and may be dismissed with a mention of their names. The principal ones were R. Jones, James Mill, J. R. M'Cul loch, Robert Torrens and W. T. 'Thornton.
The Classical School in
The in fluence of Adam Smith and of the so-called English classical school of political economy was, however, not confined to England, but affected France and Germany. The writer who most undeviatingly followed Smith was the French writer, J. B. Say (1767-1832). In his