to the hopeless despair of labor. That men can
organize to improve their lot was denied with emphasis, so that until
Francis Place even the workers themselves were half-convinced. The
manufacturers were the State; and the whole intellectual strength of
economics was massed to prove the rightness of the equation. The
literature of protest, men like Hall and Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray,
exerted no influence upon the legislation of the time; and Robert Owen
was deemed an amiable eccentric rather than the prophet of a new hope.
The men who succeeded, as Wilberforce, carried out to the letter the
unstated assumptions of Puritan economics. The poor were consigned to a
God whose dictates were by definition beneficent; and if they failed to
understand the curious incidence of his rewards that was because his
ways were inscrutable. No one who reads the tracts of writers like
Harriet Martineau can fail to see how pitiless was the operation of this
attitude. Life is made a struggle beneficent, indeed, but deriving its
ultimate meaning from the misery incident to it. The tragedy is excused
because the export-trade increases in its volume. The iron law of wages,
the assumed transition of every energetic worker to the ranks of wealth,
the danger lest the natural ability of the worker to better his
condition be sapped by giving to him that which his self-respect can
better win--these became the unconscious assumptions of all economic
discussion.

In all this, as in the foundation with which Adam Smith provided it, we
must not miss the element of truth that it contains. No poison is more
subtly destructive of the democratic State than paternalism; and the
release of the creative impulses of men must always be the coping-stone
of public policy. Adam Smith is the supreme representative of a
tradition which saw that release effected by individual effort. Where
each man cautiously pursued the good as he saw it, the realization was
bound, in his view, to be splendid. A population each element of which
was active and alert to its economic problems could not escape the
achievement of greatness. All that is true; but it evades the obvious
conditions we have inherited. For even when the psychological
inadequacies of Smith's attitude are put aside, we can judge his theory
in the light of the experience it summarizes. Once it is admitted that
the object of the State is the achievement of the good life, the final
canon of politics is bound to be a