The issues between the two economists are nowhere so well or so calmly stated as in a paper written by Malthus (a few months after Ricardo’s death) in the _Quarterly Review_,[630] where he deals with MacCulloch’s treatise on _Political Economy_.[631] In that article Malthus professes to regard the political economy of Ricardo, James Mill, and most of the economical writers in the _Encyclopædia_, as a new and wrong departure. It is said to have been regarded by the writer as one of the best economical papers he ever wrote;[632] and, among other virtues, it has the merit of perfect courtesy and respect towards the persons criticized. Their system, he says,[633] is remarkably like that of the French economists. They “were equally men of the most unquestionable genius, of the highest honour and integrity, and of the most simple, modest, and amiable manners. Their systems were equally distinguished for their discordance with common notions, the apparent closeness of their reasonings, and the mathematical precision of their calculations and conclusions founded on their assumed data. These qualities in the systems and their founders, together with the desire so often felt by readers of moderate abilities of being thought to understand what is considered by competent judges as difficult, increased the number of their devoted followers in such a degree, that in France it included almost all the able men who were inclined to attend to such subjects, and in England a very large proportion of them. “The specific error of the French economists was the having taken so confined a view of wealth and its sources as not to include the results of manufacturing and mercantile industry. “The specific error of the new school in England is the having taken so confined a view of _value_ as not to include the results of demand and supply, and of the relative abundance and competition of capital. “Facts and experience have, in the course of some years, gradually converted the economists of France from the erroneous and inapplicable theory of Quesnay to the juster and more practical theory of Adam Smith; and, as we are fully convinced that an error equally fundamental and important is involved in the system of the new school in England as in that of the French economists, we cannot but hope and expect that similar causes will, in time, produce in our own country similar effects in the correction of error and the establishment of truth.”