Note 282 — Chapter III

Place MSS. 27797—290; see a similar account in the Life of William Lovett, by himself, p. 86. James Mill writes to Lord Brougham on September 3, 1832, as follows: “Nothing can be conceived more mischievous than the doctrines which have been preached to the common people.... The nonsense to which your lordship alludes about the right of the labourer to the whole produce of the country, wages, profits, and rent all included, is the mad nonsense of our friend Hodgskin, which he has published as a system, and propagates with the zeal of perfect fanaticism.... The illicit cheap publications, in which the doctrine of the right of the labouring people, who they say are the only producers, to all that is produced, is very generally preached, ... are superseding the Sunday newspapers and every other channel through which the people might get better information” (Bain’s James Mill, p. 363, 1882). The series of Socialist authors of these years, usually ignored, have been well described by Prof. Foxwell in his Introduction to the English translation of Menger’s Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, 1899; and more fully and philosophically in M. Beer’s History of British Socialism, 1919, vol. i.