part, happiness is simply a state of mind; and he seems to have had but little suspicion that differences of wealth might issue in dangerous social consequence.  Men, moreover, he regarded as largely equal in their original powers; and differences of character he ascribes to the various occupations implied in the division of labor.  Each man, therefore, as he follows his self-interest promotes the general happiness of society.  That principle is inherent in the social order.  “Every man,” he wrote in the Moral Sentiments, “is by nature first and principally recommended to his own care” and therein he is “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”  The State, that is to say, is the sum of individual goods; whereby to better ourselves is clearly to its benefit.  And that desire “which comes with us from the womb and never leaves us till we go to the grave” is the more efficacious the less it is restrained by governmental artifice.  For we know so well what makes us happy that none can hope to help us so much as we help ourselves.

Enlightened selfishness is thus the root of prosperity; but we must not fall into the easy fallacy which makes Smith deaf to the plaint of the poor.  He urged the employer to have regard to the health and welfare of the worker, a regard which was the voice of reason and humanity.  Where there was conflict between love of the status quo and a social good which Revolution alone could achieve, he did not, at least in the Moral Sentiments, hesitate to choose the latter.  Order was, for the most part, indispensable; but “the greatest and noblest of all characters” he made the reformer of the State.  Yet he is too impressed by the working of natural economic laws to belittle their influence.  Employers, in his picture, are little capable of benevolence or charity.  Their rule is the law of supply and demand and not the Sermon on the Mount.  They combine without hesitation to depress wages to the lowest point of subsistence.  They seize every occasion of commercial misfortune to make better terms for themselves; and the greater the poverty the more submissive do servants become so that scarcity is naturally regarded as more favorable to industry.

Obviously enough, the inner hinge of all this argument is Smith’s conception of nature.  Nor can there be much doubt of what he thought its inner substance.  Facile distinctions such as the effort of Buckle to show that while in the Moral Sentiments Adam Smith was dealing with the unselfish side of man’s nature, in the Wealth of Nations he was dealing with a group of facts which required the abstraction of such altruistic elements, are really beside the point.  Nature for Smith is simply the spontaneous action of human character unchecked by hindrances of State.  It is, as Bonar has aptly said, “a vindication of the unconscious law present in the separate actions of men when these actions are directed