In his distinguished work on Philosophic Radicalism Halévy draws attention to the regret expressed by James Mill in the course of an article in The Edinburgh Review for October 1808 at “the great difficulty with which the salutary doctrines of political economy are propagated in this country”; adding that between 1776 and 1817 “not a single complete treatise on political economy appeared in England. Adam Smith remained the only authority, and he was little heeded.” Mill's views on doctrinal propagation may have been ambitious or he may have written in a pessimistic mood. But there was certainly nothing during this period approaching a “complete treatise” on the subject. (Even if Bentham's Manual of 1793–5 had come out, and been longer than it is, it would not have qualified since it was about policy and not theory.) This is not to say that there was not considerable activity and alertness in matters affecting political economy, especially in respect to pamphleteering on particular questions. To the latter class can be said to belong William Spence's Britain Independent of Commerce of 1808, and James Mill's answer to it in Commerce Defended of the same year; the latter being chiefly memorable for its sponsoring of ‘Say's Law’, as first propounded in J.-B. Say's Traité d'Économie Politique of five years before. The year 1798, moreover, had seen Malthus's Essay on Population; while in the first decade of the new century articles on questions of political economy were not uncommon in The Edinburgh Review and were a topic of discussion among the cognoscenti.