, and diminishes much less the happiness
of the rich than it adds to that of the poor." It is clear that we have
moved far from the narrow confines of the old political arithmetic. The
theory of utility enables Hume to see the scope of economics--the word
itself he did not know--in a more generous perspective than at any
previous time. It would be too much to say that his grasp of its
psychological foundation enabled him entirely to move from the
limitations of the older concept of a national prosperity expressed only
in terms of bullion to the view of economics as a social science. But at
least he saw that economics is rooted in the nature of men and therein
he had the secret of its true understanding. _The Wealth of Nations_
would less easily have made its way had not the insight of Hume prepared
the road for its reception.

What, then, and in general, is his place in the history of political
thought? Clearly enough, he is not the founder of a system; his work is
rather a series of pregnant hints than a consecutive account of
political facts. Nor must we belittle the debt he owes to his
predecessors. Much, certainly, he owed to Locke, and the full radiance
of the Scottish enlightenment emerges into the day with his teaching.
Francis Hutcheson gave him no small inspiration; and Hutcheson means
that he was indebted to Shaftesbury. Indeed, there is much of the sturdy
commonsense of the Scottish school about him, particularly perhaps in
that interweaving of ethics, politics and economics, which is
characteristic of the school from Hutcheson in the middle seventeenth
century, to the able, if neglected, Lorimer in the nineteenth.[17] He is
entitled to be considered the real founder of utilitarianism. He first
showed how difficult it is in politics to draw a distinction between
ethical right and men's opinion of what ought to be. He brings to an end
what Coleridge happily called the "metapolitical school." After him we
are done with the abuse of history to bolster up Divine Right and social
contract; for there is clearly present in his use of facts a true sense
of historical method. He put an end also to the confusion which resulted
from the effort of thinkers to erect standards of right and wrong
independent of all positive law. He took the facts as phenomena to be
explained rather than as illustrations of some favorite thesis to be
maintained in part defiance of them. Conventional Whiggism has no
foothold after he has done