or 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 part, happiness is simply a state of
mind; and he see