f automaton which fairly
represented the actual working of the machinery. But then, each
element of their construction came to represent a particular formula,
and to represent nothing else. The landlord is simply the receiver of
surplus value; the capitalist the one man who saves, and who saves in
proportion to profit; and the labourer simply the embodiment of
Malthus's multiplying tendency. Then the postulates as to the ebb and
flow of capital and labour are supposed to work automatically and
instantaneously. Ricardo argues that a tax upon wages will fall, not,
as Buchanan thought, upon the labourer, nor, as Adam Smith thought,
upon rent, but upon profits; and his reason is apparently that if
wages were 'lowered the requisite population would not be kept
up.'[339] The labourer is able to multiply or diminish so rapidly that
he always conforms at once to the required standard. This would seem
to neglect the consideration that, after all, some time is required to
alter the numbers of a population, and that other changes of a totally
different character may be meanwhile set up by rises and falls of
wages. Ricardo, as his letters show,[340] was well aware of the
necessity of making allowance for such considerations in applying his
theorems. He simplified the exposition by laying them down too
absolutely; and the doctrine, taken without qualification, gives the
'economic man,' who must be postulated to make the doctrine work
smoothly. The labourer is a kind of constant unit--absolutely fixed in
his efficiency, his wants, and so forth; and the same at one period as
at another, except so far as he may become more prudent, and therefore
fix his 'natural price' a little higher. An 'iron law' must follow
when you have invented an iron unit. In short, when society is
represented by this hypothetical mechanism, where each man is an
embodiment of the required formula, the theory becomes imperfect so
far as society is made up of living beings, varying, though
gradually, in their whole character and attributes, and forming part
of an organised society incomparably too complex in its structure to
be adequately represented by the three distinct classes, each of which
is merely a formula embodied in an individual man. The general rules
may be very nearly true in a great many cases, especially on the
stock-exchange; but before applying them to give either a history or a
true account of the actual working of concrete institutions, a much