It would be tedious to praise the Wealth of Nations.  It may be doubtful whether Buckle’s ecstatic judgment that it has had more influence than any other book in the world was justified even when he wrote; but certainly it is one of the seminal books of the modern time.  What is more important is to note the perspective in which its main teaching was set.  He wrote in the midst of the first significant beginnings of the Industrial Revolution; and his emphatic approval of Watt’s experiments suggests that he was not unalive to its importance.  Yet it cannot in any full sense be said that the Industrial Revolution has a large part in his book.  The picture of industrial organization and its possibilities is too simple to suggest that he had caught any far reaching glimpse into the future.  Industry, for him, is still in the last stage of handicraft; it is a matter of skillful workmanship and not of mechanical appliance.  Capital is still the laborious result of parsimony.  Credit is spoken of rather in the tones of one who sees it less as a new instrument of finance than a dangerous attempt by the aspiring needy to scale the heights of wealth.  Profits are always a justified return for productive labor; interest the payment for the use of the owner’s past parsimony.  Business is still the middleman distributing to the consumer on a small scale.  He did not, or could not, conceive of an industry either so vast or so depersonalized as at present.  He was rather writing of a system which, like the politics of the eighteenth century, had reached an equilibrium of passable comfort.  His natural order was, at bottom, the beatification of that to which this equilibrium tended.  Its benefits might be improved by free trade and free workmanship; but, upon the whole, he saw no reason to call in question its fundamental dogmas.

Therein, of course, may be found the main secret of his omissions.  The problem of labor finds no place in his book.  The things that the poor have absent from their lives, that concept of a national minimum below which no State can hope to fulfil even the meanest of its aims, of these he has no conception.  Rather the note of the book is a quiet optimism, impressed by the possibilities of constant improvement which lie imbedded in the human impulse to better itself.  What he did not see is the way in which the logical outcome of the system he describes may well be the attainment of great wealth at a price in human cost that is beyond its worth.  Therein, it is clear, all individualistic theories of the state miss the true essence of the social bond.  Those who came after Adam Smith saw only half his problem.  He wrote a consumer’s theory of value.  But whereas he had in mind a happy and contented people, the economics of Ricardo and Malthus seized upon a single element in human nature as that which alone the State must serve.  Freedom from restraint came ultimately to mean a judgment upon national well-being in terms of the volume of trade.  “It is not with happiness,” said Nassau Senior, “but with wealth that I am concerned as a political economist; and I am not only justified in omitting, but am perhaps bound to omit, all considerations which have no influence upon wealth.”