Harold J. Laski

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 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.

The hostility of the English landowners to the commercial classes in the eighteenth century is at bottom the inheritance of religious antagonism.

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 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.

They had no thought of sacrificing themselves to an institution which they had much ground for thinking existed only for their torment.

The State became the servant of the individual from being his master; and service became equated with an internal policy of laissez-faire.

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.

Nations grow prosperous at each other's expense; wherefore a woolen trade in Ireland necessarily spells English unemployment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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…

We are less concerned here with the specific economic details of the Wealth of Nations than with its general attitude to the State.

The man of whom Smith writes is man in search of wealth; by definition the economic motive dominates his actions.

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.

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....