emain untouched. The Ricardians insist upon the vital importance of
'capital.' The one economic end of the statesmen, as the capitalist
class naturally thinks, should be to give every facility for its
accumulation, and consequently for allowing it to distribute itself in
the most efficient way. Chalmers, on the contrary, argues that we may
easily have too much capital. He was a firm believer in gluts. He
admits that the extension of commerce was of great good at the end of
the feudal period, but not as the 'efficient cause' of wealth, only as
'unlocking the capabilities of the soil.'[413] This change produced
the illusion that commerce has a 'creative virtue,' whereas its
absolute dependence upon agriculture is a truth of capital importance
in political economy. More Malthusian than Malthus, Chalmers argues
that the case of capital is strictly parallel to the case of
population.[414] Money may be redundant as much as men, and the real
causes of every economic calamity are the 'over-speculation of
capitalists,' and the 'over-population of the community at
large.'[415] In this question, however, Chalmers gets into
difficulties, which show so hopeless a confusion between 'capital,'
income, and money, that I need not attempt to unravel his
meaning.[416] Anyhow, he is led to approve the French doctrine of the
single tax. Ultimately, he thinks, all taxes fall upon rent.[417]
Agriculture fills the great reservoir from which all the subsidiary
channels are filled. Whether the stream be tapped at the source or
further down makes no difference. Hence he infers that, as the
landlords necessarily pay the taxes, they should pay them openly. By
an odd coincidence, he would tax rents like Mill, though upon
opposite grounds. He holds that the interest of the landowners is not
opposed to, but identical with, the interest of all classes.
Politically, as well as economically, they should be supreme. They
are, 'naturally and properly, the lords of the ascendant,' and, as he
oddly complains in the year of the Reform Bill, not 'sufficiently
represented in parliament.'[418] A 'splendid aristocracy' is, he
thinks, a necessary part of the social edifice;[419] the law of
primogeniture is necessary to support them; and the division of land
will cause the decay of France. The aristocracy are wanted to keep up
a high standard of civilisation and promote philosophy, science, and
art.[420] The British aristocracy in the reign of George IV. scarcely
r