Both Malthus and Ricardo agreed with the Report of the Bullion Committee. Ricardo indeed is in a sense the father of it. Malthus (in the _Edin. Review_) speaks strongly of the bad policy and injustice of continuing the suspension, and he does not spare the Bank of England and its mischievous monopoly,[645] or the “practical men” and their narrow views.[646] Yet he finds fault with Ricardo here as elsewhere for making his statements too absolute. Malthus’ fault is in the contrary direction; he qualifies too much.[647] He thinks that Ricardo has gone too far in attributing all the movements of the Exchanges to excessive or defective currency; a purely commercial excess of imports over exports might, he thinks, cause the same effects, and even in the high price of bullion it was the commercial difficulty that began what the depreciation of currency continued. Ricardo, who replies in a long appendix,[648] answers, in substance, that in any and every case money goes from where it is cheaper to where it is dearer, and therefore from where the currency has lost value to where it has gained it. But this hardly meets the contention of Malthus, that the efficient cause, though it affects the currency, is not in all cases the currency itself, and in the case of an unequal balance of trade, however temporary, the cause of the exportation of the money is rather the superfluity of the goods in the foreign country than the deficiency of the money there;—it would be otherwise when the first cause was in the currency itself. The rest of the article contains little that is new to readers of the _Political Economy_, and the reference to a possible over-production is chiefly valuable as a sign of the authorship, and as showing that the views of the author were becoming fixed. The personal acquaintance of Malthus with Ricardo dates probably from the appearance of this article;[649] and they continued to discuss and correspond, in perfect friendship, till the death of Ricardo in Sept. 1823.[650] His friendship with the Edinburgh Reviewers remained unbroken; and, when he wrote in the _Quarterly Review_, it was the _Review_ not the writer that had changed. On finance, indeed, the _Quarterly Review_ had been saved from unsoundness by Canning’s influence,[651] and an article on Tooke’s _Prices_ need have no politics.