Autobiography | Page 9

of the
Directors, successfully. He was appointed one of the Assistants of the Examiner of India
Correspondence; officers whose duty it was to prepare drafts of despatches to India, for
consideration by the Directors, in the principal departments of administration. In this
office, and in that of Examiner, which he subsequently attained, the influence which his
talents, his reputation, and his decision of character gave him, with superiors who really
desired the good government of India, enabled him to a great extent to throw into his
drafts of despatches, and to carry through the ordeal of the Court of Directors and Board
of Control, without having their force much weakened, his real opinions on Indian
subjects. In his History he had set forth, for the first time, many of the true principles of
Indian administration: and his despatches, following his History, did more than had ever
been done before to promote the improvement of India, and teach Indian officials to
understand their business. If a selection of them were published, they would, I am
convinced, place his character as a practical statesman fully on a level with his eminence
as a speculative writer.
This new employment of his time caused no relaxation in his attention to my education. It
was in this same year, 1819, that he took me through a complete course of political
economy. His loved and intimate friend, Ricardo, had shortly before published the book
which formed so great an epoch in political economy; a book which would never have
been published or written, but for the entreaty and strong encouragement of my father;
for Ricardo, the most modest of men, though firmly convinced of the truth of his
doctrines, deemed himself so little capable of doing them justice in exposition and
expression, that he shrank from the idea of publicity. The same friendly encouragement
induced Ricardo, a year or two later, to become a member of the House of Commons;
where, during the remaining years of his life, unhappily cut short in the full vigour of his
intellect, he rendered so much service to his and my father's opinions both on political
economy and on other subjects.

Though Ricardo's great work was already in print, no didactic treatise embodying its
doctrines, in a manner fit for learners, had yet appeared. My father, therefore,
commenced instructing me in the science by a sort of lectures, which he delivered to me
in our walks. He expounded each day a portion of the subject, and I gave him next day a
written account of it, which he made me rewrite over and over again until it was clear,
precise, and tolerably complete. In this manner I went through the whole extent of the
science; and the written outline of it which resulted from my daily _compte rendu_,
served him afterwards as notes from which to write his Elements of Political Economy.
After this I read Ricardo, giving an account daily of what I read, and discussing, in the
best manner I could, the collateral points which offered themselves in our progress.
On Money, as the most intricate part of the subject, he made me read in the same manner
Ricardo's admirable pamphlets, written during what was called the Bullion controversy;
to these succeeded Adam Smith; and in this reading it was one of my father's main
objects to make me apply to Smith's more superficial view of political economy, the
superior lights of Ricardo, and detect what was fallacious in Smith's arguments, or
erroneous in any of his conclusions. Such a mode of instruction was excellently
calculated to form a thinker; but it required to be worked by a thinker, as close and
vigorous as my father. The path was a thorny one, even to him, and I am sure it was so to
me, notwithstanding the strong interest I took in the subject. He was often, and much
beyond reason, provoked by my failures in cases where success could not have been
expected; but in the main his method was right, and it succeeded. I do not believe that
any scientific teaching ever was more thorough, or better fitted for training the faculties,
than the mode in which logic and political economy were taught to me by my father.
Striving, even in an exaggerated degree, to call forth the activity of my faculties, by
making me find out everything for myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after,
I had felt the full force of the difficulties; and not only gave me an accurate knowledge of
these two great subjects, as far as they were then understood, but made me a thinker on
both. I thought for myself almost from the first, and occasionally thought differently from
him, though for a long time only on minor points, and