to be declining. In nations situated in the 'melancholic' declining state, the higher ranks of society would fall down and settle for occupation amid the lower ranks, while the lowest ranks would either subsist on a miserable and insufficient wage, resort to begging or crime, or slide into starvation and early death. Bengal and some other English settlements in the East Indies possibly found themselves in this state, Smith reckoned. Smith pointed out that as wealth was growing in any nation, the rate of profit would tend to fall and investment opportunities would diminish. In a nation that had thereby reached this 'full complement of riches', society would finally settle in a stationary state with a constant stock of people and capital. In an 18th-century anticipation of The Limits to Growth (see below), Smith described the state as follows: According to Smith, Holland seemed to be approaching this stationary state, although at a much higher level than in China. Smith believed the laws and institutions of China prevented this country from achieving the potential wealth its soil, climate and situation might have admitted of. Smith was unable to provide any contemporary examples of a nation in the world that had in fact reached the full complement of riches and thus had settled in stationarity, because, as he conjectured, "... perhaps no country has ever yet arrived at this degree of opulence." David Ricardo's concept In the early 19th century, David Ricardo was the leading economist of the day and the champion of British laissez-faire liberalism. He is known today for his free trade principle of comparative advantage, and for his formulation of the controversial labor theory of value. Ricardo replaced Adam Smith's empirical reasoning with abstract principles and deductive argument. This new methodology would later become the norm in economics as a science. In Ricardo's times, Britain's trade with the European continent was somewhat disrupted during the Napoleonic Wars that had raged since 1803. The Continental System brought into effect a large-scale embargo against British trade, whereby the nation's food supply came to rely heavily on domestic agriculture to the benefit of the landowning classes. When the wars ended with Napoleon's final defeat in 1815, the landowning classes dominating the British parliament had managed to tighten the existing Corn Laws in order to retain their monopoly status on the home market during peacetime. The controversial Corn Laws were a protectionist