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