When he was thirty, however, he left the cloister and for the remainder of his life he was an abbé, dressed as a priest and fiercely loyal to the Church, but living with his family or friends and giving all of his time to scholarship and writing.

He anticipated certain doctrines of Adam Smith and Thomas Robert Malthus, especially the latter, as he felt that the population propagation, if it were allowed free rein, would take place in a geometric progression with a doubling every 30 years.

It is with this purpose that he wrote his Errori popolari intorno all’Economia nazionale, his Lettere sulla Religione and his treatise Dei fidecommessi a famiglie e a chiese e luoghi pii, with the scope of upholding the existence of clerical property in mortmain and of refuting the criticism voiced by those Enlightenment writers who strongly opposed the extended landed properties of the Church.

XXI, XXII and XXIII of Pietro Custodi’s Scrittori classici italiani di Economia Politica, Milan, 1802-1816) Ortes endeavors to demonstrate that as “the wealth of a nation is determined by the (previous) wants of its members, the riches of one of them cannot increase unless at the expense of another one; the bulk of existing riches is in each nation measured by its wants, and cannot by any means whatever exceed this measure” (Discorso Preliminare).

[4] Ortes is a harbinger of Malthus; first by his law of the geometrical increase of population, and secondly by the influence which he ascribes to human reason as a prudential check against overpopulation.

Ortes was a fervent mathematical student, and expresses himself in algebraical formulae in his Calcolo sopra il Valore dell’Opinioni umane (vol.

Ortes is undoubtedly the most eminent of the Venetian economists of the 18th century; his genius — original and sometimes paradoxical, is often opposed to the general tendency of the ideas of his time, and though his researches are occasionally faulty in their method, he has left a deep impress on the history of economic theory.