Much of the contemporary philosophy, moreover, fits in with this attitude.  From the time of Bacon, the main object of speculation was to disrupt the scholastic teleology.  In the result the State becomes dissolved into a discrete mass of individuals, and the self-interest of each is the starting-point of all inquiry.  Hobbes built his state upon the selfishness of men; even Locke makes the individual enter political life for the benefits that accrue therefrom.  The cynicism of Mandeville, the utilitarianism of Hume, are only bypaths of the same tradition.  The organic society of the middle ages gives place to an individual who builds the State out of his own desires.  Liberty becomes their realization; and the object of the State is to enable men in the fullest sense to secure the satisfaction of their private wants.  How far is that conception from the Anglican outlook of the seventeenth century, a sermon of Laud’s makes clear.  “If any man,” he said,[19] “be so addicted to his private interest that he neglects the common State, he is void of the sense of piety, and wishes peace and happiness for himself in vain.  For, whoever he be, he must live in the body of the commonwealth and in the body of the Church.”  So Platonic an outlook was utterly alien from the temper of puritanism.  They had no thought of sacrificing themselves to an institution which they had much ground for thinking existed only for their torment.  The development of the religious instinct to the level of salvation found its philosophic analogue in the development of the economic sense of fitness.  The State became the servant of the individual from being his master; and service became equated with an internal policy of laissez-faire.

[Footnote 19:  Sermon of June 19, 1621.  Works (ed. of 1847), p. 28.]

Such summary, indeed, abridges the long process of release from which the eighteenth century had still to suffer; nor does it sufficiently insist upon the degree to which the old idea of state control still held sway in external policies of trade.  Mercantilism was still in the ascendant when Adam Smith came to write.  Few statesmen of importance before the younger Pitt had learned the secret of its fallacies; and, indeed, the chief ground for difference between Chatham and Burke was the former’s suspicion that Burke had embraced the noxious doctrine of free trade.  Mercantilism, by the time of Locke, is not the simple error that wealth consists in bullion but the insistence that the balance of trade must be preserved.  Partly it was doubtless derived from the methods of the old political arithmetic of men like Petty and Davenant; the individual seeks a balance at the end of his year’s accounting and so, too, the State must have a balance.  “A Kingdom,” said Locke, “grows rich or poor just as a farmer does, and no other way”; and while there is a sense in which this is wholly true, the meaning attached to it by the mercantilists was that foreign competition meant national weakness.