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There may, it is true, be no explicit mention of Malthus in Carlyle's two 
pieces. But one of his principal, and explicit, targets there, as 
elsewhere, was the impersonal "cash nexus" that was, in Carlyle's view, 
perverting social and economic relationships in mid-19th century 
England--hence his lamentation in these essays of the plight of the 
impoverished, often "involuntarily" idle, "Distressed" "white" 
needlewomen of London, who would be much better off were they bound in a 
"not easily dissoluble," long-term contract. In the hands of Carlyle, Tory 
Radicals, Christian socialists, and other assorted groups, such routine 
attacks on the cash nexus were synonymous with their criticisms of the 
classical economic paradigms of Malthus, Ricardo, and their successors.  
The short of it is that Carlyle's virulently racist argument in the two 
essays that the "idle" freedpeople of the British West Indies should be 
returned to a state of compulsory servitude (in part for their own moral 
betterment) was a quite inextricable part of his general criticism of 
supply-and-demand free market processes, the involuntary and voluntary 
idleness that these processes ostensibly encouraged, and classical 
economics' sanctification of these processes.  
 
Jonathan Glickstein  
 
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