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comparative cost admits that two countries ordinarily engage in commerce, either because each possesses exclusive capacity for the production of a characteristic commodity, or because one of the two countries, although physically able to produce both commodities, can only produce one of the two at absolutely greater cost than can the other country. But going beyond this, it interprets the phenomena resulting from the relative immobility of labour and capital as to international movement, whereby the world's trade is largely in the nature of a commerce subsisting between countries, one of which is able to produce two commodities traded in at unequal advantage, but withal at absolutely lower cost than can the other country. For such cases, as well as for the related condition in which-with an identical advantage in favour of the one country with respect to the production of both commodities-the territorial division of labour theory, in itself, affords no motive for the actually resultant commerce. In short, a commerce may subsist between Portugal and Great Britain, not merely because Great Britain is physically unable to produce wine, or can only produce it by the use of Adam Smith's "glasses, hot beds, and hot walls" at thirty times the cost in Portugal; but because Great Britain, although able both to grow wine and manufacture hardware at less absolute cost than Portugal, can manufacture the hardware at 50 per cent., and can grow the wine at 25 per cent. less, than can Portugal respectively. It is this last circumstance, and the related fact that if the advantage in favour of Great Britain be 50 per cent. with respect alike to hardware and wine, there will be no economic motive to trade-that made it necessary to distinguish in theoretical analysis the facts of foreign from those of domestic. trade, and to formulate a special theory of international exchange.

The differences between these clearly distinguishable theories are not merely of simple and complex subject-matter, nor of analogous and independent analysis, but extend even to doctrinal origin. The territorial division of labour theory was foreshadowed in the liberal reaction of the eighteenth century against the mercantilist assumption of the one-sided benefits of commerce. Barbon (Discourse, 78), North (Discourses, 12-13), Vanderlint (Money, 97), Harris (Essay, 23), Tucker (Four Tracts, 75-78), Hume (Of the Jealousy of Trade), Steuart (Inquiry, I., 273)-all contain traces of it. William Bell of Cambridge-discussing "the effect of populousness upon trade "— enunciates the principle with clearness (Dissertation, 32). In the Wealth of Nations the definitive refutation of the mercantilist

fallacy is more conspicuous than a positive theory of trade, but withal, the beginning of the Napoleonic contest found the doctrine widely diffused in England that international trade represents a mutually advantageous exchange between countries of commodities peculiarly fitted to their respective qualities. This theory was rudely assailed in William Spence's Britain Independent of Commerce (1807), written in the train of the Berlin Decree. Revamping the doctrine of the Physiocrats, Spence insisted that agriculture was the source of England's real strength, and that there was nothing to fear from Napoleon's blockade. The message was congenial to the feverish public mind, Cobbett gave it approval and vogue in the Political Register, and the pamphlet went to a fourth edition within a few months. To James Mill, as independently to Thomas Chalmers and Colonel Torrens, the arguments seemed false, and the conclusions dangerous enough to invite rejoinder, and within the year (1808) appeared Mill's Commerce Defended, Torrens's Economists Refuted, and Chalmers's National Resources. In each of the three-slightly and inadequately in Chalmers (pp. 141-144), clearly and succinctly in Mill (pp. 35-39), minutely and convincingly in Torrens, the principle of what Mill regarded as "extended," and Torrens termed "territorial," division of labour was invoked in proof of the productivity of commerce.

The comparative cost theory, on the other hand, came almost a decade later, and emanated, like the doctrine of rent, in the closing years of the Napoleonic contest from the free trade sympathies of the Ricardian group in the intense struggle of the English agriculturist to preserve his home market. The Parliamentary committees of 1813-14 had shown that despite extension of cultivation and improvement in method, England was engaged in unsuccessful competition with foreign grain, and higher corn duties were recommended. To prove the futility of such relief, economic analysis formulated the principle that the importation of foreign grain, far from betokening national decline in the form. of absolute dearth or physical exhaustion of English soil, only evidenced the superior productivity of English industry. By virtue of great industrial development, England making more goods and making them cheaper, found it advantageous to send these to other countries in exchange for corn, rather than to raise her own food supply.

The theory of foreign trade enunciated in Torrens's Economists Refuted corresponds in every particular with the first of the doctrines described above, and that referred to in one particular

paragraph of Torrens's Corn Trade and fully set forth in Ricardo's Principles, with the second. On the score of analytical content, accepted usage and doctrinal origin, it seems to me, therefore, that warrant exists for continuing to distinguish the two theories, and to insist that, by virtue of the Economists Refuted alone, Torrens is not the author of the doctrine of comparative cost.

Even though the theory of comparative cost be not actually enunciated in the Economists Refuted, Professor Seligman, in the final summary of his argument, credits Torrens with "putting a little more explicitly [in the Corn Trade in 1815] what was implicit in the first statement" [in the Economists Refuted in 1808]. In proof of this assertion he cites Torrens's expressions as to the exchange of English broadcloth for French lace, and English tin for wine. But this embodies the very error against which Cairnes warned (Leading Principles, pt. iii., chap. i., § 3): "When it is said that international trade depends on a difference in the comparative, not in the absolute, cost of producing commodities, the costs compared, it must be carefully noted, are the costs in each country of the commodities which are the subjects of exchange, not the different costs of the same commodity in the exchanging countries." The "advantage" which figures in the citation from Torrens refers exclusively to "the different costs of the same commodity in the exchanging countries." Nowhere in the Economists Refuted is there any allusion to "the costs in each country of the commodities which are the subjects of exchange."

Similarly with respect to the passages which Professor Seligman cites from Torrens's Corn Trade and Peel's Act, and from Ricardo's Principles. The paragraphs referred to are explanations of international trade by the territorial division of labour, and if Torrens and Ricardo had written nothing beyond these, their claim to authorship of the theory of comparative cost would have been as indefensible as Torrens's in so far as dependent upon the Economists Refuted. But, as a matter of fact, the passage cited from Ricardo serves merely as an introduction to a full exposition of the theory of comparative cost, while Torrens's case to the extent that it possesses any merit rests, as will hereafter appear, upon a subsequent paragraph of the Corn Trade.

II.

We can now revert to Professor Seligman's original argument, based solely upon the passages in the first edition, and in the

preface to the third edition of Torrens's Corn Trade. The opinion that I here ventured to advance was that such statements were insufficient, in face of presumptive evidence and positive testimony to the contrary, to justify the grave charge of adoption, without acknowledgment, by Ricardo.

The theory of international trade set forth in Torrens's Corn Trade is, with a single exception, the principle of territorial division of labour as propounded in the Economists Refuted: Commerce is advantageous in that it enables a country to obtain a greater quantity of other goods in exchange than the same labour and capital could have produced at home. This is the central argument of Torrens's essay, and the essential basis for his advocacy of freedom in the "external corn trade." In the latter part of the Corn Trade, detached from the earlier statements of the theory, with neither antecedent nor consequent, and figuring only as an explanation of the possible importation of corn by a country before lands of superior quality have been brought under the plough-occurs the single paragraph upon which Torrens's claim rests. When Professor Seligman dissents from my characterisation of this passage as "the theory in outline," and declares that, in reality, however, "the treatment by Torrens is almost as full as that by Ricardo," I can only understand that he again identifies the territorial division of labour with the comparative cost theory.

Such as it is, however, the paragraph in Torrens's Corn Trade was printed before the chapter in Ricardo's Principles. It is possible to stop at this point and make final award of discovery upon bare physical priority. In this manner Adam Smith has been charged with exploiting Turgot, Malthus with appropriating from Wallace, West with borrowing from Anderson, Thornton with plagiarising from Longe, and innumerable other expositors with having been "anticipated" by earlier writers. But accepted historical method is chary of such automatic award, and insists upon interpreting doctrinal identities in the light of internal evidence and relevant circumstance.

Indeed, unless such larger considerations govern, the case might at the very outset be claimed for Ricardo, on the ground that in 1844 Torrens made virtual recantation of authorship. This is the import of phrase after phrase in Torrens's open letter (The Budget, 1844) in reply to Senior's drastic criticisms (Edinburgh Review, January, 1843): "The principles of international exchange which I had borrowed from Ricardo" (p. 332); "the Ricardo doctrine of international exchange (p. 333); "his

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[Ricardo's] profound and original chapter upon Foreign Trade" (p. 336); "The conclusions which I have endeavoured to establish in The Budget are deduced from the principle propounded by Ricardo" (p. 342); "In entering upon a conflict in defence of the discoveries of Ricardo" (p. 342); "Such is the Ricardo doctrine of international exchange" (p. 345); "the doctrine established by Ricardo" (p. 393); "the Ricardo theory of international exchange which, in those letters [addressed to the electors of Bolton in 1832] I had attempted to elucidate" (p. 372).

Similarly the "undisputed facts" which Professor Seligman sets forth at the outset of his paper illustrate the insecurity of inference from identity. The corn trade of Poland-exploited by economists as far back as the Wealth of Nations (bk. ii., ch. v.; bk. iii., ch. iii.)—was naturally enough a prime concern of the Parliamentary Committees of 1813-14, and page after page of the printed reports refers thereto (Lords Second Report, 1814, pp. 11, 34-5, 53-4, 62, 75). The fact that this "identical example" was employed by Torrens and Ricardo may indicate the common use of a documentary source, but it can hardly be deemed evidence of plagiarism. Again, five years before Torrens used the phrases "comparative advantage 'comparative advantage" and "comparative disadvantage" in the preface (not in the text) to the third edition (1826) of the Corn Trade, James Mill, in the Elements of Political Economy (1821)-avowedly a paraphase of Ricardo's Principles in the section on "Foreign Trade," spoke of "comparative facility," compares the cost," "compared with the cost "-expressions which led easily enough to John Stuart Mill's "comparative cost" in the essay, "Of the Laws of Interchange between Nations," written in 1829-30. But even more than this, Professor Seligman states: "Neither Torrens nor Ricardo uses the term comparative cost.' This term was introduced by Mill in his Unsettled Questions in 1844." This overlooks the fact that Torrens did use the identical term "comparative cost"-although, unfortunately, to describe a different concept (Corn Trade, 1826, p. 41; see also "comparatively," Ibid., p. 39-both terms inserted in this edition). So that if it be the word "comparative" to which significance attaches, James Mill rather than Torrens is to be accorded priority, and if it be "comparative cost"-then as late as 1826 Torrens had still to learn the meaning of the term.

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