with him in the admission above quoted, that increase of wealth might go to fixed capital instead of wages.[676] Orthodox economy became most abstract when on the death of Ricardo in 1823 its doctrines passed into the hands of the Minor Prophets. In the last ten years of his life Malthus made no serious change in his economical views, and approached no nearer to the Ricardians. They were years when economists and political reformers had not learned to work together so harmoniously as they were to do after his death. Huskisson’s changes in commercial policy were preparing the way in high quarters for free trade. The sliding scale of corn duties introduced in 1826 pointed on the whole in the same direction. But the agitation of the humbler classes for political freedom, made solid as it was by an appreciable progress in popular education,[677] and kept within bounds of law by the influence of Cobbett,[678] went on in a way apart; and it will be remembered how Chartism stood aloof from the Anti-Corn-Law League. A man might be an advanced economist and social reformer and a reactionary in politics. In 1824, when trades unions were for the first time allowed by law and the Factory Acts were still too imperfect to give the weak a fair chance against the strong, the “natural state of things,” free development of individual and national faculties, did not exist; and Malthus, who missed them keenly, would have been much amazed to hear that his doctrines were, like Ricardo’s, a vindication of things as they are. Not only the notorious fact of his opposition to Ricardo, but his views on commercial policy are against the notion.[679] At the Peace there were many fallacies current about wages. The new Corn Law of 1815 had inaugurated the aggressive policy of the agricultural interest, who frankly endeavoured, by forms of law, to convert an occasional scarcity into a permanent one, and keep prices at 80_s._ a quarter. Not a few false friends of the working man recommended him to countenance the law and let his bread be made dear, for then, said they, his wages would be made high. Many manufacturers, on the other hand, were declaring the interest of the country to be low wages, and, unto that end, cheap food and a great population. Malthus was with neither. His partial approval of the new Corn Law was no doubt based on erroneous grounds; but he held no such mistaken views of wages. His opinion, if not sufficiently obvious from his general views of population, was laid down explicitly in all his writings. He says, for example: “If a country can only be rich, by running a successful race for low wages, I should be disposed to say at once ‘Perish such riches!’”[680] “It is most desirable that the labouring classes should be well paid, for a much more important reason than any that can relate to wealth, namely, the happiness of the great mass of society.”[681] Being asked, “In a national point of view,