made the hampering system of government-control seem incompatible with industrial advance.  The mercantilism against which the work of Adam Smith was so magistral a protest was already rather a matter of external than internal commerce when he wrote.  He triumphed less because he suddenly opened men’s eyes to a truth hitherto concealed than because he represented the culmination of certain principles which, under various aspects, were common to his time.  The movement for religious toleration is not only paralleled in the next century by the movement for economic freedom, but is itself in a real sense the parent of the latter.  For it is not without significance that the pre-Adamite economists were almost without exception the urgent defenders of religious toleration.  The landowners were churchmen, the men of commerce largely Nonconformist; and religious proscription interfered with the balance of trade.  When the roots of religious freedom had been secured, it was easy for them to transfer their argument to the secular sphere.

Nothing, indeed, is more important in the history of English political philosophy than to realize that from Stuart times the Nonconformists were deeply bitten with distrust of government.  Its courts of special instance hampered industrial life at every turn in the interest of religious conformity.  Their heavy fines and irritating restrictions upon foreign workmen were nothing so much as a tax upon industrial progress.  What the Nonconformists wanted was to be left alone; and Davenant explained the root of their desire when he tells of the gaols crowded with substantial tradesmen whose imprisonment spelt unemployment for thousands of workmen.  Sir William Temple, in his description of Holland, represents economic prosperity as the child of toleration.  The movement for ecclesiastical freedom in England, moreover, became causally linked with that protest against the system of monopolies with which it was the habit of the court to reward its favorites.  Freedom in economic matters, like freedom in religion, came rapidly to mean permission that diversity shall exist; and economic diversity soon came to mean free competition.  The latter easily became imbued with religious significance.  English puritanism, as Troeltsch has shown us, insisted that work was the will of God and its performance the test of grace.  The greater the energy of its performance, the greater the likelihood of prosperity; and thence it is but a step to argue that the free development of a man’s industrial worth is the law of God.  Success in business, indeed, became for many a test of religious grace, and poverty the proof of God’s disfavor.  Books like Steele’s Religious Tradesman (1684) show clearly how close is the connection.  The hostility of the English landowners to the commercial classes in the eighteenth century is at bottom the inheritance of religious antagonism.  The typical qualities of dissent became a certain pushful exertion by which the external criteria of salvation could be secured.