iberty to him meant absence of
restraint not because its more positive aspect was concealed from him
but rather because the kind of freedom wanted in the environment in
which he moved was exactly that for which he made his plea. There is a
hint that freedom as a positive thing was known to him from the fact
that he relied upon education to relieve the evils of the division of
labor. But the general context of his book required less emphasis upon
the virtues of state-interference than upon its defects. His cue was to
show that all the benefits of regulation had been achieved despite its
interference; from which, of course, it followed that restraint was a
matter of supererogation.

III

It would be tedious to praise the _Wealth of Nations_. It may be
doubtful whether Buckle's ecstatic judgment that it has had more
influence than any other book in the world was justified even when he
wrote; but certainly it is one of the seminal books of the modern time.
What is more important is to note the perspective in which its main
teaching was set. He wrote in the midst of the first significant
beginnings of the Industrial Revolution; and his emphatic approval of
Watt's experiments suggests that he was not unalive to its importance.
Yet it cannot in any full sense be said that the Industrial Revolution
has a large part in his book. The picture of industrial organization and
its possibilities is too simple to suggest that he had caught any far
reaching glimpse into the future. Industry, for him, is still in the
last stage of handicraft; it is a matter of skillful workmanship and not
of mechanical appliance. Capital is still the laborious result of
parsimony. Credit is spoken of rather in the tones of one who sees it
less as a new instrument of finance than a dangerous attempt by the
aspiring needy to scale the heights of wealth. Profits are always a
justified return for productive labor; interest the payment for the use
of the owner's past parsimony. Business is still the middleman
distributing to the consumer on a small scale. He did not, or could not,
conceive of an industry either so vast or so depersonalized as at
present. He was rather writing of a system which, like the politics of
the eighteenth century, had reached an equilibrium of passable comfort.
His natural order was, at bottom, the beatification of that to which
this equilibrium tended. Its benefits might be improved by free trade
and free workmanship; but, upo