Certainly his pamphlets on events in France are at every point consistent with his earlier doctrine. The charge that he supported the Revolution in America and deserted it in France is without meaning; for in the one there is no word that can honorably be twisted to support the other. And when we make allowances for the grave errors of personal taste, the gross exaggeration, the inability to see the Revolution as something more than a single point in time, it becomes obvious enough that his criticism, de Maistre's apart, is by far the soundest we possess from the generation which knew the movement as a living thing. The attempt to produce an artificial equality upon which he seized as the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship. He realized that freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of doctrinaire thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom. "The nature of man is intricate"; he wrote in the Reflections, "the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity; and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man's nature or to the quality of his affairs." The note recurs in substance throughout his criticism. Much of its application, indeed, will not stand for one moment the test of inquiry; as when, for instance, he correlates the monarchical government of France with the English constitutional system and extols the perpetual virtues of 1688. The French made every effort to find the secret of English principles, but the roots were absent from their national experience.

A year after the publication of the Reflections he himself perceived the narrowness of that judgment. In the Thoughts on French Affairs (1791) he saw that the essence of the Revolution was its foundation in theoretic dogma. It was like nothing else in the history of the world except the Reformation; which last event it especially resembles in its genius for self-propagation. Herein he has already envisaged the importance of that "patrie intellectuelle" which Tocqueville emphasized as born of the Revolution. That led Burke once again to insist upon the peculiar genius of each separate state, the difficulties of a change, the danger of grafting novelties upon an ancient fabric. He saw the certainty that in adhering to an abstract metaphysical scheme the French were in truth omitting human nature from their political equation; for general ideas can find embodiment in institutional forms only after they have been moulded by a thousand varieties of circumstance. The French created an universal man not less destructive of their practical sagacity than the Frankenstein of the economists. They omitted, as Burke saw, the elements which objective experience must demand; with the result that, despite themselves, they came rather to destroy than to fulfil. Napoleon, as Burke prophesied, reaped the harvest of their failure.

Nor was he less right in his denunciation of that distrust of the past which played so large a part in the revolutionary consciousness. "We are afraid," he wrote in the Reflections, "to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason, because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages." Of Sieyes' building constitutions overnight, this is no unfair picture; but it points a more general truth never long absent from Burke's mind. Man is for him so much the creature of prejudice, so much a mosaic of ancestral tradition, that the chance of novel thought finding a peaceful place among his institutions is always small. For Burke, thought is always at the service of the instincts, and these lie buried in the remote experience of the state. So that men like Robespierre were asking from their subjects an impossible task. That which they had conceived in the gray abstractness of their speculations was too little related to what the average Frenchman knew and desired to be enduring. Burke looks with sober admiration at the way in which the English revolution related itself at every point to ideas and theories with which the average man was as familiar as with the physical landmarks of his own neighborhood. For the motives which underlie all human effort are, he thought, sufficiently constant to compel regard. That upon which they feed submits to change; but the effort is slow and the disappointments many. The Revolution taught the populace the thirst for power. But it failed to remember that sense of continuity in human effort without which new constructions are built on sand. The power it exercised lacked that horizon of the past through which alone it suffers limitation to right ends.

The later part of Burke's attack upon the Revolution does not belong to political philosophy. No man is more responsible than he for the temper which drew England into war. He came to write rather with the zeal of a fanatic waging a holy war than in the temper of a statesman confronted with new ideas. Yet even the Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796) have flashes of the old, incomparable insight; and they show that even in the midst of his excesses he did not war for love of it. So that it is permissible to think he did not lightly pen those sentences on peace which stand as oases of wisdom in a desert of extravagant rhetoric. "War never leaves where it found a nation," he wrote, "it is never to be entered upon without mature deliberation." That was a lesson his generation had still to learn; nor did it take to heart the even nobler passage that follows. "The blood of man," he said, "should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for mankind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime." It is perhaps the most tragic wrong in that century's history that these words were written to justify an effort of which they supply an irrefutable condemnation.



V

Criticism of Burke's theories can be made from at least two angles. It is easy to show that his picture of the British Constitution was remote from the facts even when he wrote. Every change that he opposed was essential to the security of the next generation; and there followed none of the disastrous consequences he had foreshadowed. Such criticism would be at almost every point just; and yet it would fail to touch the heart of Burke's position. What is mainly needed is analysis at once of his omissions and of the underlying assumptions of what he wrote. Burke came to his maturity upon the eve of the Industrial Revolution; and we have it upon the authority of Adam Smith himself that no one had so clearly apprehended his own economic principles. Yet there is no word in what Burke had to say of their significance. The vast agrarian changes of the time contained, as it appears, no special moment even for him who burdened himself unduly to restore the Beaconsfield estate. No man was more eager than he that the public should be admitted to the mysteries of political debate; yet he steadfastly refused to draw the obvious inference that once the means of government were made known those who possessed the knowledge would demand their share in its application. He did not see that the metaphysics he so profoundly distrusted was itself the offspring of that contemptible worship of expediency which Blackstone generalized into a legalistic jargon. Men never move to the adumbration of general right until the conquest of political rights has been proved inadequate. That Burke himself may be said in a sense to have seen when he insisted upon the danger of examining the foundations of the State. Yet a man who refuses to admit that the constant dissatisfaction with those foundations his age expressed is the expression of serious ill in the body politic is wilfully blind to the facts at issue. No one had more faithfully than Burke himself explained why the Whig oligarchy was obsolete; yet nothing would induce him ever to realize that the alternative to aristocratic government is democracy and that its absence was the cause of that disquiet of which he realized that Wilkes was but the symptom.

Broadly, that is to say, Burke would not realize that the reign of political privilege was drawing to its close. That is the real meaning of the French Revolution and therein it represents a stream of tendency not less active in England than abroad. In France, indeed, the lines were more sharply drawn than elsewhere. The rights men craved were not, as Burke insisted, the immediate offspring of metaphysic fancy, but the result of a determination to end the malignant wrong of centuries. A power that knew no responsibility, war and intolerance that derived only from the accidental caprice of the court, arrest that bore no relation to offence, taxation inversely proportionate to the ability to pay, these were the prescriptive privileges that Burke invited his generation to accept as part of the accumulated wisdom of the past. It is not difficult to see why those who swore their oath in the tennis-court at Versailles should have felt such wisdom worthy to be condemned. Burke's caution was for them the timidity of one who embraces existent evils rather than fly to the refuge of an accessible good. In a less degree, the same is true of England. The constitution that Burke called upon men to worship was the constitution which made the Duke of Bedford powerful, that gave no representation to Manchester and a member to Old Sarum, which enacted the game laws and left upon the statute-book a penal code which hardly yielded to the noble attack of Romilly. These, which were for Burke merely the accidental excrescences of a noble ideal, were for them its inner essence; and where they could not reform they were willing to destroy.

The revolutionary spirit, in fact, was as much the product of the past as the very institutions it came to condemn. The innovations were the inevitable outcome of past oppression. Burke refused to see that aspect of the picture. He ascribed to the crime of the present what was due to the half-wilful errors of the past. The man who grounded his faith in historic experience refused to admit as history the elements alien from his special outlook. He took that liberty not to venerate where he was unable to comprehend which he denied to his opponents. Nor did he admit the uses to which his doctrine of prescription was bound to be put in the hands of selfish and unscrupulous men. No one will object to privilege for a Chatham; but privilege for the Duke of Grafton is a different thing, and Burke's doctrine safeguards the innumerable men of whom Grafton is the type in the hope that by happy accident some Chatham will one day emerge. He justifies the privileges of the English Church in the name of religious well-being; but it is difficult to see what men like Watson or Archbishop Cornwallis have got to do with religion. The doctrine of prescription might be admirable if all statesmen were so wise as Burke; but in the hands of lesser men it becomes no more than the protective armour of vested interests into the ethics of which it refuses us leave to examine.

That suspicion of thought is integral to Burke's philosophy, and it deserves more examination than it has received. In part it is a rejection of the Benthamite position that man is a reasoning animal. It puts its trust in habit as the chief source of human action; and it thus is distrustful of thought as leading into channels to which the nature of man is not adapted. Novelty, which is assumed to be the outcome of thought, it regards as subversive of the routine upon which civilization depends. Thought is destructive of peace; and it is argued that we know too little of political phenomena to make us venture into the untried places to which thought invites us. Yet the first of many answers is surely the most obvious fact that if man is so much the creature of his custom no reason would prevail save where they proved inadequate. If thought is simply a reserve power in society, its strength must obviously depend upon common acceptance; and that can only come when some routine has failed to satisfy the impulses of men. But we may urge a difficulty that is even more decisive. No system of habits can ever hope to endure long in a world where the cumulative power of memory enables change to be so swift; and no system of habits can endure at all unless its underlying idea represents the satisfaction of a general desire. It must, that is to say, make rational appeal; and, indeed, as Aristotle said, it can have virtue only to the point where it is conscious of itself. The uncritical routine of which Burke is the sponsor would here deprive the mass of men of virtue. Yet in modern civilization the whole strength of any custom depends upon exactly that consciousness of right which Burke restricted to his aristocracy. Our real need is less the automatic response to ancient stimulus than power to know what stimulus has social value. We need, that is to say, the gift of criticism rather than the gift of inert acceptance. Not, of course, that the habits which Burke so earnestly admired are at all part of our nervous endowment in any integral sense. The short space of the French Revolution made the habit of thinking in terms of progress an essential part of our intellectual inheritance; and where the Burkian school proclaims how exceptional progress has been in history, we take that as proof of the ease with which essential habit may be acquired. Habit, in fact, without philosophy destroys the finer side of civilized life. It may leave a stratum to whom its riches have been discovered; but it leaves the mass of men soulless automata without spontaneous response to the chords struck by another hand.

Burke's answer would, of course, have been that he was not a democrat. He did not trust the people and he rated their capacity as low. He thought of the people—it was obviously a generalization from his time—as consistently prone to disorder and checked only by the force of ancient habit. Yet he has himself supplied the answer to that attitude. "My observation," he said in his Speech on the East India Bill, "has furnished me with nothing that is to be found in any habits of life or education which tends wholly to disqualify men for the functions of government." We can go further than that sober caution. We know that there is one technique only capable of securing good government and that is the training of the mass of men to interest in it. We know that no State can hope for peace in which large types of experience are without representation. Indeed, if proof were here wanting, an examination of the eighteenth century would supply it. Few would deny that statesmen are capable of disinterested sacrifice for classes of whose inner life they are ignorant; yet the relation between law and the interest of the dominant class is too intimate to permit with safety the exclusion of a part of the State from sharing in its guidance. Nor did Burke remember his own wise saying that "in all disputes between the people and their rulers the presumption is at least upon a par in favor of the people"; and he quotes with agreement that great sentence of Sully's which traces popular violence to popular suffering. No one can watch the economic struggles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or calculate the pain they have involved to humble men, without admitting that they represent the final protest of an outraged mind against oppression too intolerable to be borne. Burke himself, as his own speeches show, knew little or nothing of the pain involved in the agrarian changes of his age. The one way to avoid violent outbreak is not exclusion of the people from power but their participation in it. The popular sense of right may often, as Aristotle saw, be wiser than the opinion of statesmen. It is not necessary to equate the worth of untrained commonsense with experienced wisdom to suggest that, in the long run, neglect of common sense will make the effort of that wisdom fruitless.

This, indeed, is to take the lowest ground. For the case against Burke's aristocracy has a moral aspect with which he did not deal. He did not inquire by what right a handful of men were to be hereditary governors of a whole people. Expediency is no answer to the question, for Bentham was presently to show how shallow was that basis of consent. Once it is admitted that the personality of men is entitled to respect institutional room must be found for its expression. The State is morally stunted where their powers go undeveloped. There is something curious here in Burke's inability to suspect deformity in a system which gave his talents but partial place. He must have known that no one in the House of Commons was his equal. He must have known how few of those he called upon to recognize the splendor of their function were capable of playing the part he pictured for them. The answer to a morally bankrupt aristocracy is surely not the overwhelming effort required in its purification when the plaintiff is the people; for the mere fact that the people is the plaintiff is already evidence of its fitness for power. Burke gave no hint of how the level of his governing class could be maintained. He said nothing of what education might accomplish for the people. He did not examine the obvious consequences of their economic status. Had his eyes not been obscured by passion the work of that States-General the names in which appeared to him so astonishing in their inexperience, might have given him pause. The "obscure provincial advocates ... stewards of petty local jurisdictions ... the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation" legislated, out of their inexperience, for the world. Their resolution, their constancy, their high sense of the national need, were precisely the qualities Burke demanded in his governing class; and the States-General did not move from the straight path he laid down until they met with intrigue from those of whom Burke became the licensed champion.

Nor is it in the least clear that his emphasis upon expediency is, in any real way, a release from metaphysical inquiry. Rather may it be urged that what was needed in Burke's philosophy was the clear avowal of the metaphysic it implied. Nothing is more greatly wanted in political inquiry than discovery of that "intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise" which, as Mr. Justice Holmes has said, is the true foundation of so many of our political judgments. The theory of natural rights upon which Burke heaped such contempt was wrong rather in its form than in its substance. It clearly suffered from its mistaken effort to trace to an imaginary state of nature what was due to a complex experience. It suffered also from its desire to lay down universal formulae. It needed to state the rights demanded in terms of the social interests they involved rather than in the abstract ethic they implied. But the demands which underlay the thought of men like Price and Priestley was as much the offspring of experience as Burke's own doctrine. They made, indeed, the tactical mistake of seeking to give an unripe philosophic form to a political strategy wherein, clearly enough, Burke was their master. But no one can read the answers of Paine and Mackintosh, who both were careful to avoid the panoply of metaphysics, to the Reflections, without feeling that Burke failed to move them from their main position. Expediency may be admirable in telling the statesmen what to do; but it does not explain the sources of his ultimate act, nor justify the thing finally done. The unconscious deeps which lie beneath the surface of the mind are rarely less urgent than the motives that are avowed. Action is less their elimination than their index; and we must penetrate within their recesses before we have the full materials for judgment.

Considered in this fashion, the case for natural rights is surely unanswerable. The things that men desire correspond, in some rough fashion, to the things they need. Natural rights are nothing more than the armour evolved to protect their vital interests. Upon the narrow basis of legal history it is, of course, impossible to protect them. History is rather the record of the thwarting of human desire than of its achievement. But upon the value of certain things there is a sufficient and constant opinion to give us assurance that repression will ultimately involve disorder. Nor is there any difference between the classes of men in this regard. Forms, indeed, will vary; and the power we have of answering demand will always wait upon the discoveries of science. Our natural rights, that is to say, will have a changing content simply because this is not a static world. But that does not mean, as Burke insisted, that they are empty of experience. They come, of course, mainly from men who have been excluded from intimate contact with the fruits of power. Nonconformists in religion, workers without land or capital save the power of their own hands, it is from the disinherited that they draw, as demands, their strength. Yet it is difficult to see, as Burke would undoubtedly have insisted, that they are the worse from the source whence they derive. Rather do they point to grave inadequacy in the substance of the state, inadequacy neglect of which has led to the cataclysms of historic experience. The unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his lack of moral insight into the problem he confronted.

That lack of insight must, of course, be given some explanation; and its cause seems rooted in Burke's metaphysic outlook. He was profoundly religious; and he did not doubt that the order of the universe was the command of God. It was, as a consequence, beneficent; and to deny its validity was, for him, to doubt the wisdom of God. "Having disposed," he wrote, "and marshalled us by a divine tactic, not according to our will, but to His, He had, in and by that disposition, vitally subjected us to act the part which belongs to the place assigned us." The State, in fact, it is to be built upon the sacrifice of men; and this they must accept as of the will of God. We are to do our duty in our allotted station without repining, in anticipation, doubtless, of a later reward. What we are is thus the expression of his goodness; and there is a real sense in which Burke may be said to have maintained the inherent rightness of the existing order. Certainly he throws a cloak of religious veneration about the purely metaphysical concept of property; and his insistence upon the value of peace as opposed to truth is surely part of the same attitude. Nor is it erroneous to connect this background with his antagonism to the French Revolution. What there was most distressing to him was the overthrowal of the Church, and he did not hesitate, in very striking fashion, to connect revolutionary opinion with infidelity. Indeed Burke, like Locke, seems to have been convinced that a social sense was impossible in an atheist; and his Letters on a Regicide Peace have a good deal of that relentless illogic which made de Maistre connect the first sign of dissent from ultramontanism with the road to a denial of all faith. Nothing is more difficult than to deal with a thinker who has had a revelation; and this sense that the universe was a divine mystery not to be too nearly scrutinized by man grew greatly upon Burke in his later years. It was not an attitude which reason could overthrow; for its first principle was an awe in the presence of facts to which reason is a stranger.

There is, moreover, in Burke a Platonic idealism which made him, like later thinkers of the school, regard existing difficulties with something akin to complacent benevolence. What interested him was the idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it, was not of the essence of its nature. He denied, that is to say, that the degree to which a purpose is fulfilled is as important as the purpose itself. A thing becomes good by the end it has in view; and the deformities of time and place ought not to lead us to deny the beauty of the end. It is the great defect of all idealistic philosophy that it should come to the examination of facts in so optimistic a temper. It never sufficiently realizes that in the transition from theoretic purpose to practical realization a significant transformation may occur. We do not come to grips with the facts. What we are bidden to remember is the splendor of what the facts are trying to be. The existing order is beatified as a necessary stage in a beneficent process. We are not to separate out the constituent elements therein, and judge them as facts in time and space. Society is one and indivisible; and the defects do not at any point impair the ultimate integrity of the social bond.

Yet it is surely evident that in the heat and stress of social life, we cannot afford so long a period as the basis for our judgment. We may well enough regard the corruption of the monarchy under the later Hanoverians as the necessary prelude to its purification under Victoria; but that does not make it any the less corrupt. We may even see how a monistic view of society is possible to one who, like Burke, is uniquely occupied with the public good. But the men who, like Muir and Hardy in the treason trials of the Revolution, think rather in terms of the existing disharmonies than the beauty of the purpose upon which they rest, are only human if they think those disharmonies more real than the purpose they do not meet. They were surely to be pardoned if, reading the Reflections of Burke, they regarded class distinctions as more vital than their harmony of interest, when they saw the tenacity with which privileges they did not share were defended. It is even possible to understand why some insisted that if those privileges were, as Burke had argued, essential to the construction of the whole, it was against that whole, alike in purpose and in realization, that they were in revolt. For them the fact of discontinuity was vital. They could not but ask for happiness in their own individual lives no less than in the State of which they were part. They came to see that without self-government in the sense of their own active participation in power, such happiness must go unfulfilled. The State, in fact, may have the noblest purpose; but its object is attempted by agents who are also mortal men. The basis of their scrutiny became at once pragmatic. The test of allegiance to established institutions became immediately the achievement for which they were responsible. The achievement, as they urged, was hardly written with adequacy in terms of the lives of humble men. That was why they judged no attitude of worth which sought the equation of the real and the ideal. The first lesson of their own experience of power was the need for its limitation by the instructed judgment of free minds.[18]

[Footnote 18: Cf. my Authority in the Modern State, pp. 65-9.]



VI

No man was more deeply hostile to the early politics of the romantic movement, to the Contrat Social of Rousseau and the Political Justice of Godwin, than was Burke; yet, on the whole, it is with the romantics that Burke's fundamental influence remains. His attitude to reason, his exaltation of passion and imagination over the conscious logic of men, were of the inmost stuff of which they were made. In that sense, at least, his kinship is with the great conservative revolution of the generation which followed him. Hegel and Savigny in Germany, de Maistre and Bonald in France, Coleridge and the later Wordsworth in England, are in a true sense his disciples. That does not mean that any of them were directly conscious of his work but that the movement he directed had its necessary outcome in their defence of his ideals. The path of history is strewn with undistributed middles; and it is possible that in the clash between his attitude and that of Bentham there were the materials for a fuller synthesis in a later time. Certainly there is no more admirable corrective in historical politics that the contrast they afford.

It is easy to praise Burke and easier still to miss the greatness of his effort. Perspective apart, he is destined doubtless to live rather as the author of some maxims that few statesmen will dare to forget than as the creator of a system which, even in its unfinished implications, is hardly less gigantic than that of Hobbes or Bentham. His very defects are lessons in themselves. His unhesitating inability to see how dangerous is the concentration of property is standing proof that men are over-prone to judge the rightness of a State by their own wishes. His own contempt for the results of reasonable inquiry is a ceaseless lesson in the virtue of consistent scrutiny of our inheritance. His disregard of popular desire suggests the fatal ease with which we neglect the opinion of those who stand outside the active centre of political conflict. Above all, his hostility to the Revolution should at least make later generations beware lest novelty of outlook be unduly confounded with erroneous doctrine.

Yet even when such deduction has been made, there is hardly a greater figure in the history of political thought in England. Without the relentless logic of Hobbes, the acuteness of Hume, the moral insight of T.H. Green, he has a large part of the faculties of each. He brought to the political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity, such as no other statesman has ever possessed. His flashes of insight are things that go, as few men have ever gone, into the hidden deeps of political complexity. Unquestionably, his speculation is rather that of the orator in the tribune than of the thinker in his study. He never forgot his party, and he wrote always in that House of Commons atmosphere which makes a man unjust to the argument and motives of his opponent. Yet, when the last word of criticism has been made, the balance of illumination is immense. He illustrates at its best the value of that party-system the worth of which made so deep an impression on all he wrote. He showed that government by discussion can be made to illuminate great principles. He showed also that allegiance to party is never inconsistent with the deeper allegiance to the demand of conscience. When he came to the House of Commons, the prospects of representative government were very dark; and it is mainly to his emphasis upon its virtues that its victory must be attributed. Institutional change is likely to be more rapid than in his generation; for we seem to have reached that moment when, as he foresaw, "they who persist in opposing that mighty current will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself than the mere designs of men." The principles upon which we proceed are doubtless different from those that he commended; yet his very challenge to their wisdom only gives to his warning a deeper inspiration for our effort.



CHAPTER VII

THE FOUNDATIONS OF ECONOMIC LIBERALISM



I

The Industrial Revolution is hardly less a fundamental change in the habits of English thought than in the technique of commercial production. Alongside the discoveries of Hargreaves and Crompton, the ideas of Hume and Adam Smith shifted the whole perspective of men's minds. The Revolution, indeed, like all great movements, did not originate at any given moment. There was no sudden invention which made the hampering system of government-control seem incompatible with industrial advance. The mercantilism against which the work of Adam Smith was so magistral a protest was already rather a matter of external than internal commerce when he wrote. He triumphed less because he suddenly opened men's eyes to a truth hitherto concealed than because he represented the culmination of certain principles which, under various aspects, were common to his time. The movement for religious toleration is not only paralleled in the next century by the movement for economic freedom, but is itself in a real sense the parent of the latter. For it is not without significance that the pre-Adamite economists were almost without exception the urgent defenders of religious toleration. The landowners were churchmen, the men of commerce largely Nonconformist; and religious proscription interfered with the balance of trade. When the roots of religious freedom had been secured, it was easy for them to transfer their argument to the secular sphere.

Nothing, indeed, is more important in the history of English political philosophy than to realize that from Stuart times the Nonconformists were deeply bitten with distrust of government. Its courts of special instance hampered industrial life at every turn in the interest of religious conformity. Their heavy fines and irritating restrictions upon foreign workmen were nothing so much as a tax upon industrial progress. What the Nonconformists wanted was to be left alone; and Davenant explained the root of their desire when he tells of the gaols crowded with substantial tradesmen whose imprisonment spelt unemployment for thousands of workmen. Sir William Temple, in his description of Holland, represents economic prosperity as the child of toleration. The movement for ecclesiastical freedom in England, moreover, became causally linked with that protest against the system of monopolies with which it was the habit of the court to reward its favorites. Freedom in economic matters, like freedom in religion, came rapidly to mean permission that diversity shall exist; and economic diversity soon came to mean free competition. The latter easily became imbued with religious significance. English puritanism, as Troeltsch has shown us, insisted that work was the will of God and its performance the test of grace. The greater the energy of its performance, the greater the likelihood of prosperity; and thence it is but a step to argue that the free development of a man's industrial worth is the law of God. Success in business, indeed, became for many a test of religious grace, and poverty the proof of God's disfavor. Books like Steele's Religious Tradesman (1684) show clearly how close is the connection. The hostility of the English landowners to the commercial classes in the eighteenth century is at bottom the inheritance of religious antagonism. The typical qualities of dissent became a certain pushful exertion by which the external criteria of salvation could be secured.

Much of the contemporary philosophy, moreover, fits in with this attitude. From the time of Bacon, the main object of speculation was to disrupt the scholastic teleology. In the result the State becomes dissolved into a discrete mass of individuals, and the self-interest of each is the starting-point of all inquiry. Hobbes built his state upon the selfishness of men; even Locke makes the individual enter political life for the benefits that accrue therefrom. The cynicism of Mandeville, the utilitarianism of Hume, are only bypaths of the same tradition. The organic society of the middle ages gives place to an individual who builds the State out of his own desires. Liberty becomes their realization; and the object of the State is to enable men in the fullest sense to secure the satisfaction of their private wants. How far is that conception from the Anglican outlook of the seventeenth century, a sermon of Laud's makes clear. "If any man," he said,[19] "be so addicted to his private interest that he neglects the common State, he is void of the sense of piety, and wishes peace and happiness for himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the commonwealth and in the body of the Church." So Platonic an outlook was utterly alien from the temper of puritanism. They had no thought of sacrificing themselves to an institution which they had much ground for thinking existed only for their torment. The development of the religious instinct to the level of salvation found its philosophic analogue in the development of the economic sense of fitness. The State became the servant of the individual from being his master; and service became equated with an internal policy of laissez-faire.

[Footnote 19: Sermon of June 19, 1621. Works (ed. of 1847), p. 28.]

Such summary, indeed, abridges the long process of release from which the eighteenth century had still to suffer; nor does it sufficiently insist upon the degree to which the old idea of state control still held sway in external policies of trade. Mercantilism was still in the ascendant when Adam Smith came to write. Few statesmen of importance before the younger Pitt had learned the secret of its fallacies; and, indeed, the chief ground for difference between Chatham and Burke was the former's suspicion that Burke had embraced the noxious doctrine of free trade. Mercantilism, by the time of Locke, is not the simple error that wealth consists in bullion but the insistence that the balance of trade must be preserved. Partly it was doubtless derived from the methods of the old political arithmetic of men like Petty and Davenant; the individual seeks a balance at the end of his year's accounting and so, too, the State must have a balance. "A Kingdom," said Locke, "grows rich or poor just as a farmer does, and no other way"; and while there is a sense in which this is wholly true, the meaning attached to it by the mercantilists was that foreign competition meant national weakness. They could not conceive a commercial bargain which was profitable to both sides. Nations grow prosperous at each other's expense; wherefore a woolen trade in Ireland necessarily spells English unemployment. Even Davenant, who was in many respects on the high road to free trade, was in this problem adamant. Protection was essential in the colonial market; for unless the trade of the colonies was directed through England they might be dangerous rivals. So Ireland and America were sacrificed to the fear of British merchants, with the inevitable result that repression brought from both the obvious search for remedy.

Herein it might appear that Adam Smith had novelty to contribute; yet nothing is more certain than that his full sense of the world as the only true unit of marketing was fully grasped before him. In 1691 Sir Dudley North published his Discourses upon Trade. Therein he clearly sees that commercial barriers between Great Britain and France are basically as senseless as would be commercial barriers between Yorkshire and Middlesex. Indeed, in one sense, North goes even further than Adam Smith, for he argues against the usury laws in terms Bentham would hardly have disowned. Ten years later an anonymous writer in a tract entitled Considerations on the East India Trade (1701) has no illusions about the evil of monopoly. He sees with striking clarity that the real problem is not at any cost to maintain the industries a nation actually possesses, but to have the national capital applied in the most efficient channels. So, too, Hume dismissed the Mercantile theory with the contemptuous remark that it was trying to keep water beyond its proper level. Tucker, as has been pointed out, was a free trader, and his opinion of the American war was that it was as mad as those who fought "under the peaceful Cross to recover the Holy Land"; and he urged, indeed, prophesied, the union with Ireland in the interest of commercial amity. Nor must the emphasis of the Physiocrats upon free trade be forgotten. There is no evidence now that Adam Smith owed this perception to his acquaintance with Quesnay and Turgot; but they may well have confirmed him in it, and they show that the older philosophy was attacked on every side.

Nor must we miss the general atmosphere of the time. On the whole his age was a conservative one, convinced, without due reason, that happiness was independent of birth or wealth and that natural law somehow could be made to justify existing institutions. The poets, like Pope, were singing of the small part of life which kings and laws may hope to cure; and that attitude is written in the general absence of economic legislation during the period. Religiously, the Church exalted the status quo; and where, as with Wesley, there was revolt, its impetus directed the mind to the source of salvation in the individual act. It may, indeed, be generally argued that the religious teachers acted as a social soporific. Where riches accumulated, they could be regarded as the blessing of God; where they were absent their unimportance for eternal happiness could be emphasized. Burke's early attack on a system which condemned "two hundred thousand innocent persons ... to so intolerable slavery" was, in truth, a justification of the existing order. The social question which, in the previous century, men like Bellers and Winstanley had brought into view, dropped out of notice until the last quarter of the century. There was, that is to say, no organized resistance possible to the power of individualism; and resistance was unlikely to make itself heard once the resources of the Industrial Revolution were brought into play. Men discovered with something akin to ecstasy the possibilities of the new inventions; and when the protest came against the misery they effected, it was answered that they represented the working of that natural law by which the energies of men may raise them to success. And discontent could easily, as with the saintly Wilberforce, be countered by the assertion that it was revolt against the will of God.



II

Few lives represent more splendidly than that of Adam Smith the speculative ideal of a dispassionate study of philosophy. He was fortunate in his teachers and his friends. At Glasgow he was the pupil of Francis Hutcheson; and even if he was taught nothing at Oxford, at least six years of leisure gave him ample opportunity to learn. His professorship at Glasgow not only brought him into contact with men like Hume, but also admitted him to intercourse with a group of business men whose liberal sentiments on commerce undoubtedly strengthened, if they did not originate, his own liberal views. At Glasgow, too, in 1759, he published his Theory of Moral Sentiments, written with sufficient power of style to obscure its inner poverty of thought. The book brought him immediately a distinguished reputation from a public which exalted elegance of diction beyond all literary virtues. The volatile Charles Townshend made him tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch, through whom Smith not only secured comparative affluence for the rest of his days, but also a French tour in which he met at its best the most brilliant society in Europe. The germ of his Wealth of Nations already lay hidden in those Glasgow lectures which Mr. Cannan has so happily recovered for us; and it was in a moment of leisure in France that he set to work to put them together in systematic fashion. Not, indeed, that the Frenchmen whom he met, Turgot, Quesnay and Dupont de Nemours, can be said to have done more than confirm the truths he had already been teaching. When he returned to Scotland and a competence ten years of constant labor were necessary before the Wealth of Nations was complete. After its publication, in 1776, Adam Smith did little save attend to the administrative duties of a minor, but lucrative office in the Customs. Until the end, indeed, he never quite gave up the hope, foreshadowed first in the Moral Sentiments of completing a gigantic survey of civilized institutions. But he was a slow worker, and his health was never robust. It was enough that he should have written his book and cherished friendships such as it is given to few men to possess. Hume and Burke, Millar the jurist, James Watt, Foulis the printer, Black the chemist and Hutton of geological fame—it is an enviable circle. He had known Turgot on intimate terms and visited Voltaire on Lake Geneva. Hume had told him that his book had "depth and solidity and acuteness"; the younger Pitt had consulted him on public affairs. Few men have moved amid such happy peace within the very centre of what was most illustrious in their age.

We are less concerned here with the specific economic details of the Wealth of Nations than with its general attitude to the State. But here a limitation upon criticism must be noted. The man of whom Smith writes is man in search of wealth; by definition the economic motive dominates his actions. Such abuse, therefore, as Ruskin poured upon him is really beside the point when his objective is borne in mind. What virtually he does is to assume the existence of a natural economic order which tends, when unrestrained by counter-tendencies, to secure the happiness of men. "That order of things which necessity imposes in general," he writes, "... is, in every particular country promoted by the natural inclinations of man"; and he goes on to explain what would have resulted "if human institutions had never thwarted those natural inclinations." "All systems either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away," he writes again, "the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest in his own way.... The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which no human wisdom or knowledge would ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interests of the society."

The State, in this conception has but three functions—defence, justice and "the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain." The State, in fact, is simply to provide the atmosphere in which production is possible. Nor does Smith conceal his thought that the main function of justice is the protection of property. "The affluence of the rich," he wrote, "excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want and prompted by envy to invade their possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, acquired by the labor of many years, or perhaps many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security." The attitude, indeed, is intensified by his constant sense that the capital which makes possible new productivity is the outcome of men's sacrifice; to protect it is thus to safeguard the sources of wealth itself. And even if the State is entrusted with education and the prevention of disease, this is rather for the general benefit they confer and the doubt that private enterprise would find them profitable than as the expression of a general rule. Collective effort of every kind awakened in him a deep distrust. Trade regulations such as the limitation of apprenticeship he condemned as "manifest encroachment upon the just liberty of the workman and of those who may be disposed to employ him." Even educational establishments are suspect on the ground—not unnatural after his own experience of Oxford—that their possibilities of comfort may enervate the natural energies of men.

The key to this attitude is clear enough. The improvement of society is due, he thinks not to the calculations of government but to the natural instincts of economic man. We cannot avoid the impulse to better our condition; and the less its effort is restrained the more certain it is that happiness will result. We gain, in fact, some sense of its inherent power when we bear in mind the magnitude of its accomplishment despite the folly and extravagance of princes. Therein we have some index of what it would achieve if left unhindered to work out its own destinies. Human institutions continually thwart its power; for those who build those institutions are moved rather "by the momentary fluctuations of affairs" than their true nature. "That insidious and crafty animal, vulgarly called a politician or statesman" meets little mercy for his effort compared to the magic power of the natural order. "In all countries where there is a tolerable security," he writes, "every man of common understanding will endeavor to employ whatever stock he can command in procuring either present enjoyment or future profit." Individual spontaneity is thus the root of economic good; and the real justification of the state is the protection it affords to this impulse. Man, in fact, is by nature a trader and he is bound by nature to discover the means most apt to progress.

Nor was he greatly troubled by differences of fortune. Like most of the Scottish school, especially Hutcheson and Hume, he thought that men are much alike in happiness, whatever their station or endowments. For there is a "never-failing certainty" that "all men sooner or later accommodate themselves to whatever becomes their permanent situation"; though he admits that there is a certain level below which poverty and misery go hand in hand. But, for the most part, happiness is simply a state of mind; and he seems to have had but little suspicion that differences of wealth might issue in dangerous social consequence. Men, moreover, he regarded as largely equal in their original powers; and differences of character he ascribes to the various occupations implied in the division of labor. Each man, therefore, as he follows his self-interest promotes the general happiness of society. That principle is inherent in the social order. "Every man," he wrote in the Moral Sentiments, "is by nature first and principally recommended to his own care" and therein he is "led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention." The State, that is to say, is the sum of individual goods; whereby to better ourselves is clearly to its benefit. And that desire "which comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go to the grave" is the more efficacious the less it is restrained by governmental artifice. For we know so well what makes us happy that none can hope to help us so much as we help ourselves.

Enlightened selfishness is thus the root of prosperity; but we must not fall into the easy fallacy which makes Smith deaf to the plaint of the poor. He urged the employer to have regard to the health and welfare of the worker, a regard which was the voice of reason and humanity. Where there was conflict between love of the status quo and a social good which Revolution alone could achieve, he did not, at least in the Moral Sentiments, hesitate to choose the latter. Order was, for the most part, indispensable; but "the greatest and noblest of all characters" he made the reformer of the State. Yet he is too impressed by the working of natural economic laws to belittle their influence. Employers, in his picture, are little capable of benevolence or charity. Their rule is the law of supply and demand and not the Sermon on the Mount. They combine without hesitation to depress wages to the lowest point of subsistence. They seize every occasion of commercial misfortune to make better terms for themselves; and the greater the poverty the more submissive do servants become so that scarcity is naturally regarded as more favorable to industry.

Obviously enough, the inner hinge of all this argument is Smith's conception of nature. Nor can there be much doubt of what he thought its inner substance. Facile distinctions such as the effort of Buckle to show that while in the Moral Sentiments Adam Smith was dealing with the unselfish side of man's nature, in the Wealth of Nations he was dealing with a group of facts which required the abstraction of such altruistic elements, are really beside the point. Nature for Smith is simply the spontaneous action of human character unchecked by hindrances of State. It is, as Bonar has aptly said, "a vindication of the unconscious law present in the separate actions of men when these actions are directed by a certain strong personal motive." Adam Smith's argument is an assumption that the facts can be made to show the relative powerlessness of institutions in the face of economic laws grounded in human psychology. The psychology itself is relatively simple, and, at least in the Wealth of Nations not greatly different from the avowed assumptions of utilitarianism. He emphasizes the strength of reason in the economic field, and his sense that it enables men to judge much better of their best interests than an external authority can hope to do. And therefore the practices accomplished by this reason are those in which the impulses of men are to be found. The order they represent is the natural order; and whatever hinders its full operation is an unwise check upon the things for which men strive.

Obviously enough, this attitude runs the grave risk of seeming to abstract a single motive—the desire for wealth—from the confused welter of human impulses and to make it dominant at the expense of human nature itself. A hasty reading of Adam Smith would, indeed, confirm that impression; and that is perhaps why he seemed to Ruskin to blaspheme human nature. But a more careful survey, particularly when the Moral Sentiments is borne in mind suggests a different conclusion. His attitude is implicit in the general medium in which he worked. What he was trying to do was less to emphasize that men care above all things for the pursuit of wealth than that no institutional modifications are able to destroy the power of that motive to labor. There is too much history in the Wealth of Nations to make tenable the hypothesis of complete abstraction. And there is even clear a sense of a nature behind his custom when he speaks of a "sacred regard" for life, and urges that every man has property in his own labor. The truth here surely is that Smith was living in a time of commercial expansion. What was evident to him was the potential wealth to be made available if the obsolete system of restraint could be destroyed. Liberty to him meant absence of restraint not because its more positive aspect was concealed from him but rather because the kind of freedom wanted in the environment in which he moved was exactly that for which he made his plea. There is a hint that freedom as a positive thing was known to him from the fact that he relied upon education to relieve the evils of the division of labor. But the general context of his book required less emphasis upon the virtues of state-interference than upon its defects. His cue was to show that all the benefits of regulation had been achieved despite its interference; from which, of course, it followed that restraint was a matter of supererogation.



III

It would be tedious to praise the Wealth of Nations. It may be doubtful whether Buckle's ecstatic judgment that it has had more influence than any other book in the world was justified even when he wrote; but certainly it is one of the seminal books of the modern time. What is more important is to note the perspective in which its main teaching was set. He wrote in the midst of the first significant beginnings of the Industrial Revolution; and his emphatic approval of Watt's experiments suggests that he was not unalive to its importance. Yet it cannot in any full sense be said that the Industrial Revolution has a large part in his book. The picture of industrial organization and its possibilities is too simple to suggest that he had caught any far reaching glimpse into the future. Industry, for him, is still in the last stage of handicraft; it is a matter of skillful workmanship and not of mechanical appliance. Capital is still the laborious result of parsimony. Credit is spoken of rather in the tones of one who sees it less as a new instrument of finance than a dangerous attempt by the aspiring needy to scale the heights of wealth. Profits are always a justified return for productive labor; interest the payment for the use of the owner's past parsimony. Business is still the middleman distributing to the consumer on a small scale. He did not, or could not, conceive of an industry either so vast or so depersonalized as at present. He was rather writing of a system which, like the politics of the eighteenth century, had reached an equilibrium of passable comfort. His natural order was, at bottom, the beatification of that to which this equilibrium tended. Its benefits might be improved by free trade and free workmanship; but, upon the whole, he saw no reason to call in question its fundamental dogmas.

Therein, of course, may be found the main secret of his omissions. The problem of labor finds no place in his book. The things that the poor have absent from their lives, that concept of a national minimum below which no State can hope to fulfil even the meanest of its aims, of these he has no conception. Rather the note of the book is a quiet optimism, impressed by the possibilities of constant improvement which lie imbedded in the human impulse to better itself. What he did not see is the way in which the logical outcome of the system he describes may well be the attainment of great wealth at a price in human cost that is beyond its worth. Therein, it is clear, all individualistic theories of the state miss the true essence of the social bond. Those who came after Adam Smith saw only half his problem. He wrote a consumer's theory of value. But whereas he had in mind a happy and contented people, the economics of Ricardo and Malthus seized upon a single element in human nature as that which alone the State must serve. Freedom from restraint came ultimately to mean a judgment upon national well-being in terms of the volume of trade. "It is not with happiness," said Nassau Senior, "but with wealth that I am concerned as a political economist; and I am not only justified in omitting, but am perhaps bound to omit, all considerations which have no influence upon wealth."

In such an aspect, it was natural for the balance of investigation to swing towards the study of the technique of production; and with the growing importance of capital, as machinery was introduced, the worker, without difficulty, became an adjunct, easily replaced, to the machine. What was remembered then was the side of Adam Smith which looked upon enlightened selfishness as the key to social good. Regulation became anathema even when the evils it attempted to restrain were those which made the mass of the people incapable of citizenship. Even national education was regarded as likely to destroy initiative; or, as a pauper's dole which men of self-respect would regard with due abhorrence. The State, in short, ceased to concern itself with justice save insofar as the administration of a judicial code spelled the protection of the new industrial system. Nothing is more striking in the half-century after Adam Smith than the optimism of the economist and the business man in contrast to the hopeless despair of labor. That men can organize to improve their lot was denied with emphasis, so that until Francis Place even the workers themselves were half-convinced. The manufacturers were the State; and the whole intellectual strength of economics was massed to prove the rightness of the equation. The literature of protest, men like Hall and Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray, exerted no influence upon the legislation of the time; and Robert Owen was deemed an amiable eccentric rather than the prophet of a new hope. The men who succeeded, as Wilberforce, carried out to the letter the unstated assumptions of Puritan economics. The poor were consigned to a God whose dictates were by definition beneficent; and if they failed to understand the curious incidence of his rewards that was because his ways were inscrutable. No one who reads the tracts of writers like Harriet Martineau can fail to see how pitiless was the operation of this attitude. Life is made a struggle beneficent, indeed, but deriving its ultimate meaning from the misery incident to it. The tragedy is excused because the export-trade increases in its volume. The iron law of wages, the assumed transition of every energetic worker to the ranks of wealth, the danger lest the natural ability of the worker to better his condition be sapped by giving to him that which his self-respect can better win—these became the unconscious assumptions of all economic discussion.

In all this, as in the foundation with which Adam Smith provided it, we must not miss the element of truth that it contains. No poison is more subtly destructive of the democratic State than paternalism; and the release of the creative impulses of men must always be the coping-stone of public policy. Adam Smith is the supreme representative of a tradition which saw that release effected by individual effort. Where each man cautiously pursued the good as he saw it, the realization was bound, in his view, to be splendid. A population each element of which was active and alert to its economic problems could not escape the achievement of greatness. All that is true; but it evades the obvious conditions we have inherited. For even when the psychological inadequacies of Smith's attitude are put aside, we can judge his theory in the light of the experience it summarizes. Once it is admitted that the object of the State is the achievement of the good life, the final canon of politics is bound to be a moral one. We have to inquire into the dominant conception of the good life, the number of those upon whom it is intended that good shall be conferred.

In the light of this conception it is obvious enough that Smith's view is impossible. No mere conflict of private interests, however pure in motive, seems able to achieve a harmony of interest between the members of the State. Liberty, in the sense of a positive and equal opportunity for self-realization, is impossible save upon the basis of the acceptance of certain minimal standards which can get accepted only through collective effort. Smith did not see that in the processes of politics what gets accepted is not the will that is at every moment a part of the state-purpose, but the will of those who in fact operate the machinery of government. In the half-century after he wrote the men who dominated political life were, with the best intentions, moved by motives at most points unrelated to the national well-being. The fellow-servant doctrine would never have obtained acceptance in a state where, as he thought, employer and workman stood upon an equal footing. Opposition to the Factory Acts would never have developed in a community where it was realized that below certain standards of subsistence the very concept of humanity is impossible. Modern achievement implies a training in the tools of life; and that, for most, is denied even in our own day to the vast majority of men. In the absence of legislation, it is certain that those who employ the services of men will be their political masters; and it will follow that their Acts of Parliament will be adapted to the needs of property. That shrinkage of the purpose of the State will mean for most not merely hardship but degradation of all that makes life worthy. Upon those stunted existences, indeed, a wealthy civilization may easily be builded. Yet it will be a civilization of slaves rather than of men.

The individualism, that is to say, for which Adam Smith was zealous demands a different institutional expression from that which he gave it. We must not assume an a priori justification for the forces of the past. The customs of men may represent the thwarting of the impulses of the many at the expense of the few not less easily than they may embody a general desire; and it is surely a mistaken usage to dignify as natural whatever may happen to have occurred. A man may find self-realization not less in working for the common good than in the limited satisfaction of his narrow desire for material advancement. And that, indeed, is the starting-point of modern effort. Our liberty means the consistent expression of our personality in media where we find people like-minded with ourselves in their conception of social life. The very scale of civilization implies collective plans and common effort. The constant revision of our basic notions was inevitable immediately science was applied to industry. There was thus no reason to believe that the system of individual interests for which Smith stood sponsor was more likely to fit requirements of a new time than one which implied the national regulation of business enterprise. The danger in every period of history is lest we take our own age as the term in institutional evolution. Private enterprise has the sanction of prescription; but since the Industrial Revolution the chief lesson we have had to learn is the unsatisfactory character of that title. History is an unenviable record of bad metaphysics used to defend obsolete systems. It took almost a century after the publication of the Wealth of Nations for men to realize that its axioms represented the experience of a definite time. Smith thought of freedom in the terms most suitable to his generation and stated them with a largeness of view which remains impressive even at a century's distance.

But nothing is more certain in the history of political philosophy than that the problem of freedom changes with each age. The nineteenth century sought release from political privilege; and it built its success upon the system prepared by its predecessor. It can never be too greatly emphasized that in each age the substance of liberty will be found in what the dominating forces of that age most greatly want. With Locke, with Smith, with Hegel and with Marx, the ultimate hypothesis is always the summary of some special experience universalized. That does not mean that the past is worthless. Politics, as Seeley said, are vulgar unless they are liberalized by history; and a state which failed to see itself as a mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its novelties upon foundations of sand. Suspicions of collective effort in the eighteenth century ought not to mean suspicion in the twentieth; to think in such fashion is to fall into the error for which Lassalle so finely criticized Hegel. It is as though one were to confound the accidental phases of the history of property with the philosophic basis of property itself. From such an error it is the task of history above all to free us. For it records the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as a perennial challenge to the coming time.

The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the double tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth. On the one hand he is the founder of the classic political economy. With Ricardo, the elder Mill and Nassau Senior, the main preoccupation is the production of wealth without regard to its moral environment; and the state for them is merely an engine to protect the atmosphere in which business men achieve their labors. There is nothing in them of that fine despair which made Stuart Mill welcome socialism itself rather than allow the continuance of the new capitalist system. Herein the State is purged of moral purpose; and the utilitarian method achieves the greatest happiness by insisting that the technique of production must dominate all other circumstances. Until the Reform Act of 1867, the orthodox economists remained unchallenged. The use of the franchise was only beginning to be understood. The "new model" of trade unionism had not yet been tested in the political field. But it was discovered impossible to act any longer upon the assumptions of the abstract economic man. The infallible sense of his own interest was discovered to be without basis in the facts for the simple reason that the instruments of his perception obviously required training if they were to be applied to a complex world. Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense, passed away because it failed to build a State wherein a channel of expression might be found for the creative energies of humble men.

It is only within the last two decades that we have begun to understand the inner significance of the protest against this economic liberalism. Adam Smith had declared the source of value to lie in labor; and, at the moment of its deepest agony, there were men willing to point the moral of his tale. That it represented an incautious analysis was, for them, unimportant beside the fact that it opened once more a path whereby economics could be reclaimed for moral science. For if labor was the source of value, as Bray and Thompson pointed out, it seemed as though degradation was the sole payment for its services. They did not ask whether the organization they envisaged was economically profitable, but whether it was ethically right. No one can read the history of these years and fail to understand their uncompromising denial of its rightness. Their negation fell upon unheeding ears; but twenty years later, the tradition for which they stood came into Marx's hands and was fashioned by him into an interpretation of history. With all its faults of statement and of emphasis, the doctrine of the English socialists has been, in later hands, the most fruitful hypothesis of modern politics. It was a deliberate effort, upon the basis of Adam Smith's ideas, to create a commonwealth in the interests of the masses. Wealth, in its view, was less the mere production of goods than the accumulated happiness of humble men. The impulses it praised and sought through state-action to express were, indeed, different from those upon which Smith laid emphasis; and he would doubtless have stood aghast at the way in which his thought was turned to ends of which he did not dream. Yet he can hardly have desired a greater glory. He thus made possible not only knowledge of a State untrammelled in its economic life by moral considerations; but also the road to those categories wherein the old conception of co-operative effort might find a new expression. Those who trod in his footsteps may have repudiated the ideal for which he stood, but they made possible a larger hope in which he would have been proud and glad to share.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

This bibliography makes no pretence to completeness. It attempts only to enumerate the more obvious sources that an interested reader would care to examine.



GENERAL

LESLIE STEPHEN. History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. 1876. Vol. II, Chapters IX and X.

W.E.H. LECKY. History of England in the Eighteenth Century.

A.L. SMITH. Political Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Cambridge Modern History. Vol. VI, Chapter XXIII.

J. BONAR. Philosophy and Political Economy. Chapters V-IX.

F.W. MAITLAND. An Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality in Collected Papers. Vol. I.



CHAPTER II

JOHN LOCKE. Works (Eleventh Edition), 10 volumes. London, 1812.

H.R. FOX-BOURNE. Life of John Locke. London, 1876.

T.H. GREEN. The Principles of Political Obligation in Collected Works. Vol. II. London, 1908.

PETER. LORD KING. The Life and Letters of John Locke. London, 1858.

SIR F. POLLOCK. Locke's Theory of the State in Proc. Brit. Acad.. Vol. I. London, 1904.

S.P. LAMPRECHT. The Moral and Political Philosophy of Locke. New York, 1918.

A.A. SEATON. The Theory of Toleration under the Later Stuarts. Cambridge, 1911.

J.N. FIGGIS. The Divine Right of Kings. Cambridge, 1914.



CHAPTER III

JEREMY COLLIER. The History of Passive Obedience. London, 1689.

WILLIAM SHERLOCK. The Case of Resistance. London, 1684.

CHARLES LESLIE. The Case of the Regale (Collected Works). Vol. III, p. 291. The Rehearsal. The New Association. Cassandra. The Finishing Stroke. Obedience to Civil Government Clearly Stated. The Best Answer. The Best of All.

SAMUEL GRASCOM. A Brief Answer.

E. SHELLINGFLEET. A Vindication of their Majesties Authoritie.

B. SHOWER. A Letter to a Convocation Man.

W. WAKE. The Authority of Christian Princes. The State of the Church (1703).

FRANCIS ATTERBURY. Rights, Powers and Privileges of an English Convocation (1701).

BENJAMIN HOADLY. Origins of Civil Government (1710). Preservative Against Nonjurors (1716). Works, 3 vols. London (1773).

WILLIAM LAW. A Defence of Church Principles (ed. Gore). Edinburgh, 1904.

W. WARBURTON. Alliance between Church and State (1736).

J.H. OVERTON. The Nonjurors. New York, 1903.

T. LATHEBURY. History of Convocation. London, 1842.



CHAPTER IV

BERKELEY. Essay Towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain (1721).

H. ST. JOHN (Viscount Bolingbroke). Works. 5 vols. London, 1754.

LORD EGMONT. Faction detected by the Evidence of Facts (1742).

DAVID HUME. Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1752). Essays. (1742-1752) ed. Green & Grose. London, 1876.

W. SICHEL. Life of Bolingbroke. 2 vols. 1900-4.

J. CHURTON COLLINS. Bolingbroke and Voltaire in England.

J. HILL BURTON. Life of Hume.



CHAPTER V

MONTESQUIEU. L'Esprit des Lois (1748).

J.J. ROUSSEAU. Du Contrat Social (1762). See ed. by Vaughan, 1918.

JOHN BROWN. Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757).

ADAM FERGUSON. Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767).

WILLIAM BLACKSTONE. Commentaries (1765-9).

JEREMY BENTHAM. A Fragment on Government (1776). Ed. F.C. Montague, 1891.

J. DE LOLME. The Constitution of England (1775).

ROBERT WALLACE. Various Prospects (1761).

JOSEPH PRIESTLEY. Essay on the First Principles of Government (1768).

RICHARD PRICE. Observations on Civil Liberty (1776). Additional Observations (1777).

WILLIAM OGILVIE. The Right of Property in Land (1781). Ed. Macdonald, 1891.

JOSIAH TUCKER. Treatise on Civil Government (1781).

SAMUEL JOHNSON. Taxation No Tyranny (1775).

M. BEER. History of British Socialism (1919).

JAMES BOSWELL. Life of Samuel Johnson (1791).



CHAPTER VI

EDMUND BURKE. Collected Works. London, 1808.

JOHN MORLEY. Edmund Burke (1867). Life of Burke (1887).

J. MACCUNN. The Political Philosophy of Burke (1908).

JUNIUS. Letters (1769-72). London, 1812.

THOMAS PAINE. The Rights of Man (1791-2).

JAMES MACKINTOSH. Vendiciae Gallicae (1791).



CHAPTER VII

CHARLES DAVENANT. Works. London, 1771.

SIR DUDLEY NORTH. A Discourse upon Trade (1691).

ADAM SMITH. Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). Wealth of Nations (1776). Lectures on Justice and Police. (Ed. Cannan, 1896).

W.R. SCOTT. Life of Francis Hutcheson (1900).

JOHN RAE. Life of Adam Smith (1895).

W. BAGEHOT. Adam Smith as a Person in Coll. Works. Vol. VII.

F.W. HIRST. Adam Smith (1904).

W. HASBACH. Untersuchungen ueber Adam Smith (1891).

J. BONAR. A Catalogue of Adam Smith's Library (1894).

T. CLIFFE LESLIE. Adam Smith in Essays in Moral and Political Philosophy (1879).

E. TROELTSCH. Die Sociallehren der Christlichen Kirchen (1912).



INDEX

Addison, 69 Andrewes, 83 Ashley, 33-4 Atterbury, 102 Austin, 62

Bagehot, 9, 249 Barbeyrac, 68 Barrow, 84 Bellarmine, 83, 121 Bentham, 23, 62, 72, 151, 157, 175, 194 Berkeley, 10, 129 Blackstone, 163-4, 174f Bolingbroke, 69, 131f Bonald, 277 Bonar, 300 Bonwicke, 82 Boswell, 209 Bray, 307, 315 Brown (J.), 168 Brown (R.), 52 Burke, 7, 8, 16, 30, 157, 159, 166, 221f, 286 Burnet, 80, 87, 93 Busher, 52

Cartwright, 97 Chatham, 132, 167, 188, 262 Chillingworth, 52 Chubb, 128 Coleridge, 277 Collier, 84n Cowper, 20 Crabbe, 20

Dalrymple, 8 Darwin, 67 Davenant, 283, 287 Defoe, 8, 128, 132 Dicey, 175, 179 Disraeli, 132 Divine Right, 7, 30 Dodwell, 82 Dupont de Nemours, 292

Egmont, 142 Eldon, 159

Ferguson, 172-4 Fielding, 160 Filmer, 7, 38

Galsworthy, 171-2 George III, 13, 15, 158, 188, 213f Godwin, 10, 163, 222, 276 Goldsmith, 19, 223 Goodman, 57 Grascom, 86 Gray, 160 Green (T.H.), 61, 279

Haldane, 126 Hales, 52 Halifax, 8, 27 Hall, 17, 307 Hamilton (J.L. & B.), 19 Harrington, 147 Hegel, 249, 277, 212-3 Hickes, 83 Hoadly, 9, 22, 69, 107f Hobbes, 8, 16, 30, 40f, 72, 91, 278, 284 Hodgskin, 17, 307 Holmes (O.W.), 63n, 269 Holt, 14, Hooker, 44 Hotman, 57, 68 Hume, 8, 11, 71, 92, 143f, 278, 284, 297 Hutcheson, 11, 153, 155, 291, 297

Independents, 40

Jackson, 84 James II, 24f, 35 Johnson (Dr.), 18, 210f, 223, 230 Junius, 21, 219

Keble, 82 Kerr, 82 Knox, 57, 83, 97

Lassalle, 313 Laud, 285 Law, 22, 108f Leslie, 80, 85, 88, 90, 97, 104, 132 Locke, 7, 11, 21, 29-76, 79, 197, 207, 273, 287 de Lolme, 10, 183f

Mackintosh, 269 Madison, 63 Maine, 66, 249 Maistre, 91, 252, 273 Malthus, 305 Mandeville, 129, 284 Mariana, 57 Martin, 69 Marx, 312, 315 Melville, 121 Mill, 157 Milton, 52 Molyneux, 68 Montesquieu, 12, 63, 160f, 173, 183 Morley, 132, 223

Newton, 37 Newman, 81, 122, 125 North, 287

Ogilvie, 199f Owen, 17, 307 Oxford Movement, 81

Paine, 202, 269 Paley, 157 Pattison, 10 Penn, 58 Place, 306 Pope, 69, 128, 132 Price, 196f Priestley, 72, 190f Proast, 64 Prynne, 8, 55 Pufendorf, 68 Pulteney, 217

Quesnay, 288, 292

Renan, 249 Ricardo, 305 Richardson, 160 Richardson (S.), 52 Rousseau, 8, 74, 162f, 188, 197, 276 Royer-Collard, 226 Ruskin, 293, 301

Sanderson, 84 Savigny, 249, 277 Seeley, 312 Selden, 9 Senior, 304 Separation of Powers, 63f Shaftesbury, 11, 128, 155 Sherlock (T.), 108 Sherlock (W.), 87 Shower, 99 Sidney, 7, 57 Smith (Adam), 9, 16, 152, 195, 258, 281f Smith (A.L.), 140 Snape, 108 Social Contract, 57 Spelman, 9 Spence, 202 Stammler, 60 Steele, 284 Stephen (F.), 65 Stephen (L.), 108, 223 Stillingfleet, 37, 87, 93 Suarez, 57

Taylor, 52, 57 Temple, 283 Thompson, 307, 215 Tindal, 123 Tocqueville, 254 Toleration, 52, 64 Tucker, 71, 206f, 288 Turgot, 288, 292

Voltaire, 12, 132, 160

Wake, 80, 100f Wallace, 188 Walpole, 13, 21, 128-30 Warburton, 69, 118f, 192 Wilberforce, 290 Wilkes, 167, 188, 220 William III, 25f Williams (Roger), 52 Woolston, 128 Wordsworth, 277

THE END