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