They could not conceive a commercial bargain which was profitable to both sides.  Nations grow prosperous at each other’s expense; wherefore a woolen trade in Ireland necessarily spells English unemployment.  Even Davenant, who was in many respects on the high road to free trade, was in this problem adamant.  Protection was essential in the colonial market; for unless the trade of the colonies was directed through England they might be dangerous rivals.  So Ireland and America were sacrificed to the fear of British merchants, with the inevitable result that repression brought from both the obvious search for remedy.

Herein it might appear that Adam Smith had novelty to contribute; yet nothing is more certain than that his full sense of the world as the only true unit of marketing was fully grasped before him.  In 1691 Sir Dudley North published his Discourses upon Trade.  Therein he clearly sees that commercial barriers between Great Britain and France are basically as senseless as would be commercial barriers between Yorkshire and Middlesex.  Indeed, in one sense, North goes even further than Adam Smith, for he argues against the usury laws in terms Bentham would hardly have disowned.  Ten years later an anonymous writer in a tract entitled Considerations on the East India Trade (1701) has no illusions about the evil of monopoly.  He sees with striking clarity that the real problem is not at any cost to maintain the industries a nation actually possesses, but to have the national capital applied in the most efficient channels.  So, too, Hume dismissed the Mercantile theory with the contemptuous remark that it was trying to keep water beyond its proper level.  Tucker, as has been pointed out, was a free trader, and his opinion of the American war was that it was as mad as those who fought “under the peaceful Cross to recover the Holy Land”; and he urged, indeed, prophesied, the union with Ireland in the interest of commercial amity.  Nor must the emphasis of the Physiocrats upon free trade be forgotten.  There is no evidence now that Adam Smith owed this perception to his acquaintance with Quesnay and Turgot; but they may well have confirmed him in it, and they show that the older philosophy was attacked on every side.

Nor must we miss the general atmosphere of the time.  On the whole his age was a conservative one, convinced, without due reason, that happiness was independent of birth or wealth and that natural law somehow could be made to justify existing institutions.  The poets, like Pope, were singing of the small part of life which kings and laws may hope to cure; and that attitude is written in the general absence of economic legislation during the period.  Religiously, the Church exalted the status quo; and where, as with Wesley, there was revolt, its impetus directed the mind to the source of salvation in the individual act.  It may, indeed, be generally argued that the religious teachers acted as a social soporific.