HKB
point with him, and if you do not hear from me I shall expect you at my house on Monday, if you do not agree to come on Saturday evening.
NOTE.--Thomas Tooke, in his 'History of Prices and of the State of the Circulation from 1839 to 1847' (publ. 1848)[53], refers to this dispute between Ricardo and Malthus, on the relation of the currency to the balance of trade, and quotes long extracts from the article of Malthus in the Edinburgh Review, where (as in this correspondence[54]) Malthus maintains that the precious metals are continually used in payments made by one country to another even if, till that moment, the currencies of both have been at their usual level. The view of Ricardo is that nothing but the state of the currency can influence the foreign exchanges. As late as 1840 statesmen clung to the idea that the Directors of the Bank of England could only operate on the exchanges by increasing or diminishing the circulation[55]. Tooke (followed later by Newmarch, hardly a less authority) sides with Malthus, and thinks that Ricardo's reply to him, in the Appendix to the Tract on Bullion, is 'little more than a repetition in varied forms of expression, according to the phraseology peculiar to the theory in question, of the axiom that gold will not be exported unless it is cheaper than another commodity, assuming consequently the fact to have been that all commodities were at that time dearer in this country than they were abroad, and relatively to gold;'--whereas it appears[56] that between 1809 and 1811 the bulk of commodities were at a far higher price (measured in gold) on the Continent than in England; the 'continental system' had forced vast stores of goods to lie unsaleable in England for want of physical ability, on the part of the merchants of them, to land them on the Continent, though they did their best to smuggle them by way of Heligoland or Turkey into Germany and the door of Portugal was ajar. Coffee was unsaleable in England at 6d. the pound, and at the same time it was fetching 4s. or 5s. on the Continent. Napoleon used to look at the English price current, and, if he found gold dear and coffee cheap in England, he was satisfied that his Berlin and Milan decrees were well carried out, while the English saw only another proof that the Bank was extending its issues overmuch. Tooke and Malthus agreed that the difference between the market price and the mint price of gold bullion was the full measure of the depreciation of the currency; but the 'ultra-bullionists' would not stop there. Tooke, like Ricardo on another occasion (see Letter XLII), had to 'write a