Harold J. Laski

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.

Man, in fact, is by nature a trader and he is bound by nature to discover the means most apt to progress.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.