to others against this error[475] may be regarded as a confession of his own liability to it; and, if he obeyed his own warning at all, his position was at the best like that of the latter-day utilitarians, who try to reach happiness by making believe not to think of it. If his science had been less biassed by utility, it might have been more thorough; and we might not have had in our own time a Ricardian socialism, appearing like the ghost of the deceased Ricardian orthodoxy sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. He has the virtue of refusing to join the economical Pharisees,[476] who would not admit the elasticity of economical laws, lest they should discredit their science; but he is to blame for not pushing his quarrel against Ricardo with the same energy as against Godwin. His forces, in this campaign, were worse drilled and worse handled. It is justly said by Garnier (_Dict. de l’Écon. Pol._, art. ‘Malthus’), that in spite of its title, the _Political Economy_ of Malthus is not the exposition of a system, but simply a collection of economical papers on various subjects that had been brought specially under his notice in discussion with his friends, or (we might add) in his college class. This itself would lead him to present a much less solid front to the enemy than he did in the _Essay_. To come, in the third place, to Details, we find the human character of the _Political Economy_ of Malthus appearing not only in his view of population, where all is at last made to depend on the personal responsibility of the individual man, and legislation is good or bad according as it strengthens or weakens that responsibility,—but in his view of the Value of goods, as measured by human labour,—in his view of demand and supply, as sharing the inconstancy of the human desires that enter into both of them,—in his view of the Rent of land, as determined by the effects of human industry and skill as well as by the natural qualities of the soil,—in his view of the Wages of labour, as regulated not by an unchangeable but by a progressive minimum,—in his view of luxury, as being equally with parsimony necessary to production, and preventive of over-production,—and in his view of free trade, as a rule to which we must make exceptions if we would not cause sufferings.