FullReads

Philebus
. And for which of his merits is it that you would have me contradict him?

Phed
. O, no matter for his merits, which doubtless are past all computation, but generally as a point of hospitality. For I am of the same opinion as M—-, a very able friend of mine in Liverpool, who looks upon it as criminal to concede anything a man says in the process of a disputation: the nefarious habit of assenting (as he justly says) being the pest of conversation, by causing it to stagnate. On this account he often calls aside the talking men of the party before dinner, and conjures them with a pathetic earnestness not to agree with him in anything he may advance during the evening; and at his own table, when it has happened that strangers were present who indulged too much in the habit of politely assenting to anything which seemed to demand no particular opposition, I have seen him suddenly pause with the air of the worst-used man in the world, and exclaim, “Good heavens! is there to be no end to this? Am I never to be contradicted? I suppose matters will soon come to that pass that my nearest relations will be perfidiously agreeing with me; the very wife of my bosom will refuse to contradict me; and I shall not have a friend left on whom I can depend for the consolations of opposition.”

Phil
. Well, Phaedrus, if X. Y. Z. is so much devoted as you represent to the doctrines of Mr. Ricardo, I shall perhaps find myself obliged to indulge your wishes in this point more than my own taste in conversation would lead me to desire.

X
. And what, may I ask, is the particular ground of your opposition to Mr. Ricardo?

Phed
. I suppose that, like the man who gave his vote against Aristides, because it wearied him to hear any man surnamed the just, Philebus is annoyed by finding that so many people look up to Mr. Ricardo as an oracle.

Phil
. No: for the very opposite reason; it is because I hear him generally complained of as obscure, and as ambitiously paradoxical; two faults which I cannot tolerate: and the extracts from his writings which I have seen satisfy me that this judgment is a reasonable one.

Phed
. In addition to which, Philebus, I now recollect something which perhaps weighs with you still more, though you have chosen to suppress it; and that is, that you are a disciple of Mr. Malthus, every part of whose writings, since the year 1816 (I am assured), have had one origin–jealousy of Mr. Ricardo, “quem si non aliqua nocuisset, mortuus esset.”

X
. No, no, Phaedrus; we must not go so far as that; though undoubtedly it is true that Mr. Malthus has often conducted his opposition in a most vexatious and disingenuous manner.

Phil
. How so? In what instance? In what instance?

X
. In this, for one. Mr. Malthus, in his “Political Economy” (1820), repeatedly charged Mr. Ricardo with having confounded the two notions of “cost” and “value:” I smile, by the way, when I repeat such a charge, as if it were the office of a Ricardo to confound, or of a Malthus to distinguish: but

“Non usque adeo permiscuit imis
Longus summa dies, ut non–si voce Metelli
Serventur leges–malint a Cesare tolli.”

[Footnote: For the sake of the unclassical reader, I add a prose translation:–Not to such an extent has the lapse of time confounded things highest with things lowest, as that–if the laws can be saved only by the voice of a Metellus–they would not rather choose to be abolished by a Cesar. ]