object of speculation was to
disrupt the scholastic teleology. In the result the State becomes
dissolved into a discrete mass of individuals, and the self-interest of
each is the starting-point of all inquiry. Hobbes built his state upon
the selfishness of men; even Locke makes the individual enter political
life for the benefits that accrue therefrom. The cynicism of Mandeville,
the utilitarianism of Hume, are only bypaths of the same tradition. The
organic society of the middle ages gives place to an individual who
builds the State out of his own desires. Liberty becomes their
realization; and the object of the State is to enable men in the
fullest sense to secure the satisfaction of their private wants. How far
is that conception from the Anglican outlook of the seventeenth century,
a sermon of Laud's makes clear. "If any man," he said,[19] "be so
addicted to his private interest that he neglects the common State, he
is void of the sense of piety, and wishes peace and happiness for
himself in vain. For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the
commonwealth and in the body of the Church." So Platonic an outlook was
utterly alien from the temper of puritanism. They had no thought of
sacrificing themselves to an institution which they had much ground for
thinking existed only for their torment. The development of the
religious instinct to the level of salvation found its philosophic
analogue in the development of the economic sense of fitness. The State
became the servant of the individual from being his master; and service
became equated with an internal policy of _laissez-faire_.

[Footnote 19: Sermon of June 19, 1621. Works (ed. of 1847), p. 28.]

Such summary, indeed, abridges the long process of release from which
the eighteenth century had still to suffer; nor does it sufficiently
insist upon the degree to which the old idea of state control still held
sway in external policies of trade. Mercantilism was still in the
ascendant when Adam Smith came to write. Few statesmen of importance
before the younger Pitt had learned the secret of its fallacies; and,
indeed, the chief ground for difference between Chatham and Burke was
the former's suspicion that Burke had embraced the noxious doctrine of
free trade. Mercantilism, by the time of Locke, is not the simple error
that wealth consists in bullion but the insistence that the balance of
trade must be preserved. Partly it was doubtless derived from the
methods of