concrete illustrations, which are as
characteristically English. Marx belongs to the school of Petty, Smith,
and Ricardo, and their work is the background of his. "Capital" was the
child of English industrial conditions and English thought, born by
chance upon German soil.

Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, English economic thought
was entirely dominated by the ideas and methods of Ricardo, who has been
described by Senior, not without justice, as "the most incorrect writer
who ever attained philosophical eminence."[152] So far as such a
sweeping criticism can be justified by looseness in the use of terms, it
is justified by Ricardo's failing in this respect. That he should have
attained the eminence he did, dominating English economic thought for so
many years, in spite of the confusion which his loose and uncertain use
of words occasioned, is not less a tribute to Ricardo's genius than
evidence of the poverty of political economy in England at that time. In
view of the constant and tiresome reiteration of the charge that Marx
pillaged his labor-value theory from Thompson, Hodgskin, Bray, or some
other more or less obscure writer of the Ricardian school, it is well to
remember that there is nothing in the works of any of these writers
connected with the theory of value which is not to be found in the
earlier work of Ricardo himself. In like manner, the theory can be
traced back from Ricardo to the master he honored, Adam Smith.
Furthermore, almost a century before the appearance of "The Wealth of
Nations," Sir William Petty had anticipated the so-called Ricardian
labor-value theory of Smith and his followers.

Petty, rather than Smith, is entitled to be regarded as the founder of
the classical school of political economy, and Cossa justly calls him
"one of the most illustrious forerunners of the science of statistical
research."[153] He may indeed fairly be said to have been the father of
statistical science, and was the first to apply statistics, or
"political arithmetick," as he called it, to the elucidation of economic
theory. He boasts that "instead of using only comparative and
superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments," his method is to speak
"in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense;
and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature;
leaving those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites,
and Passions of particular Men, to the Co