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.

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