Malthus gets a similar result by applying to wages his favourite idea of the golden mean. The “funds destined to pay wages” may, he says, be increased either by high prices or by great production at low prices,—increased value without increased quantity, or increased quantity without increased value. The latter is the more secure way, but it lies on the road to “glut.” The most desirable plan is the union of the two. “There is somewhere a happy mean, where, under the actual resources of a country, both the increase of wealth and the demand for labour may be a maximum. A taste for conveniences and comforts not only tends to create a more steady demand for labour than a taste for personal services, but by cheapening manufactures and the products of foreign commerce, including many of the necessaries of the labouring classes, it actually enlarges the limits of the effectual demand for labour, and renders it for a longer time effective.”[670] If any one had urged against this, in the words of Mill, that a demand for goods is not a demand for labour, but simply gives labour a new direction, Malthus would probably have answered that the new direction was all important, because the trade begun in it might be a trade in goods more widely used, and might therefore last longer and more steadily than the old trade. We see that in his views of this subject, expounded tediously enough, and at unnecessary length, Malthus had constant thought of the relations of production and distribution to consumption as well as to each other, for the condition of the people was always more important to him than the state of the articles concerned. But he never yielded to his feelings so far as to adopt Sismondi’s reactionary ideas on the effects of machinery on the workmen.[671] He never wrote any description of the evils of division of labour at all so strong as Adam Smith’s.[672] He goes little farther than Ricardo, who says in a well-known passage:—“The same cause which may increase the nett revenue of the country may at the same time render the population redundant and deteriorate the condition of the labourer,” for all the increase may possibly be devoted to fixed and not circulating capital, to machinery and buildings instead of wages.[673] Ricardo’s admission, that he was wrong in not recognizing this sooner, makes us wonder (as men were even then doing in Germany over similar confessions of their philosophers) whether his demonstrations are more accurate than ordinary reasonings. His brother economists never claimed infallibility. Adam Smith gave up his defence of Usury Laws.[674] Malthus amended his first views on population, to say nothing of the measure of value.[675] Mill gave up the Wages Fund. It was only the minor economists who proudly remained at the end where they were at the beginning. James Mill refused to follow Ricardo in allowing that food could be over-produced, and MacCulloch refused to go