In such an aspect, it was natural for the balance of investigation to swing towards the study of the technique of production; and with the growing importance of capital, as machinery was introduced, the worker, without difficulty, became an adjunct, easily replaced, to the machine.  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.  That men can organize to improve their lot was denied with emphasis, so that until Francis Place even the workers themselves were half-convinced.  The manufacturers were the State; and the whole intellectual strength of economics was massed to prove the rightness of the equation.  The literature of protest, men like Hall and Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray, exerted no influence upon the legislation of the time; and Robert Owen was deemed an amiable eccentric rather than the prophet of a new hope.  The men who succeeded, as Wilberforce, carried out to the letter the unstated assumptions of Puritan economics.  The poor were consigned to a God whose dictates were by definition beneficent; and if they failed to understand the curious incidence of his rewards that was because his ways were inscrutable.  No one who reads the tracts of writers like Harriet Martineau can fail to see how pitiless was the operation of this attitude.  Life is made a struggle beneficent, indeed, but deriving its ultimate meaning from the misery incident to it.  The tragedy is excused because the export-trade increases in its volume.  The iron law of wages, the assumed transition of every energetic worker to the ranks of wealth, the danger lest the natural ability of the worker to better his condition be sapped by giving to him that which his self-respect can better win—­these became the unconscious assumptions of all economic discussion.

In all this, as in the foundation with which Adam Smith provided it, we must not miss the element of truth that it contains.  No poison is more subtly destructive of the democratic State than paternalism; and the release of the creative impulses of men must always be the coping-stone of public policy.  Adam Smith is the supreme representative of a tradition which saw that release effected by individual effort.  Where each man cautiously pursued the good as he saw it, the realization was bound, in his view, to be splendid.  A population each element of which