developments--even though we understand that term in its largest
sense--of any previous writer. No one can have studied political
economy in the works of its earlier cultivators without being struck
with the dreariness of the outlook which, in the main, it discloses
for the human race. It seems to have been Ricardo's deliberate
opinion, that a substantial improvement in the condition of the mass
of mankind was impossible. He considered it as the normal state of
things that wages should be at the _minimum_ requisite to support the
laborer in physical health and strength, and to enable him to bring up
a family large enough to supply the wants of the labor-market. A
temporary improvement indeed, as the consequence of expanding commerce
and growing capital, he saw that there might be; but he held that the
force of the principle of population was always powerful enough so to
augment the supply of labor as to bring wages ever again down to the
_minimum_ point. So completely had this belief become a fixed idea in
Ricardo's mind, that he confidently drew from it the consequence, that
in no case could taxation fall on the laborer, since--living, as a
normal state of things, on the lowest possible stipend adequate to
maintain him and his family--he would inevitably, he argued, transfer
the burden to his employer; and a tax nominally on wages would in the
result become invariably a tax upon profits. On this point Mill's
doctrine leads to conclusions directly opposed to Ricardo's, and to
those of most preceding economists. And it will illustrate his
position as a thinker, in relation to them, if we note how this result
was obtained. Mill neither denied the premises nor disputed the logic
of Ricardo's argument: he accepted both; and in particular he
recognized fully the force of the principle of population; but he took
account of a further premise which Ricardo had overlooked, and which,
duly weighed, led to a reversal of Ricardo's conclusion. The _minimum_
of wages, even such as it exists in the case of the worst-paid