amite economists were almost
without exception the urgent defenders of religious toleration. The
landowners were churchmen, the men of commerce largely Nonconformist;
and religious proscription interfered with the balance of trade. When
the roots of religious freedom had been secured, it was easy for them to
transfer their argument to the secular sphere.

Nothing, indeed, is more important in the history of English political
philosophy than to realize that from Stuart times the Nonconformists
were deeply bitten with distrust of government. Its courts of special
instance hampered industrial life at every turn in the interest of
religious conformity. Their heavy fines and irritating restrictions upon
foreign workmen were nothing so much as a tax upon industrial progress.
What the Nonconformists wanted was to be left alone; and Davenant
explained the root of their desire when he tells of the gaols crowded
with substantial tradesmen whose imprisonment spelt unemployment for
thousands of workmen. Sir William Temple, in his description of Holland,
represents economic prosperity as the child of toleration. The movement
for ecclesiastical freedom in England, moreover, became causally linked
with that protest against the system of monopolies with which it was the
habit of the court to reward its favorites. Freedom in economic matters,
like freedom in religion, came rapidly to mean permission that diversity
shall exist; and economic diversity soon came to mean free competition.
The latter easily became imbued with religious significance. English
puritanism, as Troeltsch has shown us, insisted that work was the will
of God and its performance the test of grace. The greater the energy of
its performance, the greater the likelihood of prosperity; and thence it
is but a step to argue that the free development of a man's industrial
worth is the law of God. Success in business, indeed, became for many a
test of religious grace, and poverty the proof of God's disfavor. Books
like Steele's _Religious Tradesman_ (1684) show clearly how close is the
connection. The hostility of the English landowners to the commercial
classes in the eighteenth century is at bottom the inheritance of
religious antagonism. The typical qualities of dissent became a certain
pushful exertion by which the external criteria of salvation could be
secured.

Much of the contemporary philosophy, moreover, fits in with this
attitude. From the time of Bacon, the main