Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III RICARDO At the present day it is a task neither of great difficulty nor of great merit to convict Adam Smith of inconsistency and even of direct contradiction. Were the purposes here in view essentially those of criticism, it would thereby be the more necessary to keep in mind that the strength of Adam Smith lay in his breadth of information, his accuracy of observation, his suggestiveness of comment, and his catholicity of doctrine. He was not in his time, and could hardly have been in any time, a close worker in systematic theory: He failed to see the town for the houses, the forest for the trees; but he knew wondrous well the houses and the trees. His habit of mind was concrete and practical. Despite, however, this consistent practicality, almost every theoretical aspect of every question struck him at one time or another. In economic doctrine, as has been said of Shakespeare in observation of life, the ocean of his sympathy lapped all the isles of thought. For the present purposes, therefore, which are, in the main, expository andanalytic rather than historical or critical, Adam Smith offers an incomparable fieldforpjrgfitable discussion and illustration. Not precisely so with Ricardo or with his contemporaries, Malthus, James Mill, and MacCulloch. Ricardo was in purpose and method a systematizer, witha theorem to jiXBOund and a tHebryto establish ; consistency and logi- were parts of the task to which, despite slight equipmentTn styleand in expository skill, he had set himself; and in this purpose, so far as consistency and logical unity were concerned, he was, on the whole, surprisingly successful. His defects of exposition, however, render the task of interpretation especially difficult: it may thus be possible that one more attempt at restatement and ...