These Hebrew prophets made the right administration of public affairs the essentially religious service which their devout student Gladstone declares them now to be.  Because of this inspiration of civic life with religiousness, their books have become, as Coleridge called them, the Statesman’s Manual.

At this period in Israel’s history the social revolution attending the progress of all peoples from a simple to a complex organization was entailing its usual excesses, and alarming symptoms were showing themselves in the commonwealth.  In earlier days Israel’s tenure of land had been, like that of all peoples, communistic.  Proprietorship of the land was vested in the family, and then in the village community.  There were no private fortunes and no private poverty.  Life was simple and contented, and dull.  Under the action of the usual social forces, this system had been gradually breaking up, through many generations.  Property had mainly passed into personal possession Society had recrystallized around the individual.  Individualism had developed its customary tendencies to inequality.  The ancient equality of the free farmers of Israel was already disappearing.  Fortunes, undreamed of a couple of centuries earlier, were becoming common.  Greed was pushing men beyond legitimate acquisition into respectable robbery.  The old-time rights of commonalty were disappearing in pasture, and farming land, and forest.  The village commons were being “enclosed” by local potentates.  Monopolies of the natural resources of all wealth, the inalienable dower of the people at large, were working their inevitable consequences.  Below the wealthy class, which was rising to the top of society, there was forming at the bottom a new and unheard-of social stratum, the settlings of the struggle for existence; a deposit of the feebleness and ignorance and innocence of the people.  In the loss of the old sense of a commonwealth, the nation was breaking up into classes, alienated, unsympathetic, hostile.  Selfishness was threatening ruin to the State.

In the midst of these dangerous social tendencies the prophets came forward as “men of the people.”  Like brave Latimer at Paul’s Cross, these fearless preachers stood in the marketplaces to denounce monopoly and the tyranny of capital.  They were not affrighted by the hue and cry that, if human nature was the same then as now, was raised against them, in the name of the sacred rights of property.  They were not beguiled by the sophisms of those who doubtless proved conclusively that the best interests of the people were being furthered by the fullest freedom of the able and crafty to enrich themselves ad libitum.  They could not have stood an examination in political economy, but they knew the heart of the whole matter, in a world whose core is the moral law.  They saw, more or less clearly, that there could be no lasting wealth in a society which was not based upon a wide, deep common-wealth.  They felt that the one clue to follow in every social problem was held by conscience.  So they struck boldly at existing wrongs in the name of the Eternal Righteous One.