When he defends the Boiling Act, under which human beings were actually boiled alive in Smithfield, he shakes confidence in his judgment.

He sets too much value upon the verdicts of Henry's tribunals, forgetting Macaulay's emphatic declaration that State trials before 1688 were murder under the forms of law.

Although the subject of his Prize Essay at Oxford was "The Influence of the Science of Political Economy upon the Moral and Social Welfare of a Nation," he never to the end of his life understood what political economy was.

Misled by Carlyle, he conceived it to be a sort of "Gospel," a rival system to the Christian religion, instead of useful generalisations from the observed course of trade.

He never got rid of the idea that Governments could fix the rate of wages and the price of goods.