of political opinion was at electioneering. The chain of progress, he would have said, runs from division of labor to rising efficiency; from there to surplus and savings, and then further to the development of capital and a rising percentage of producers in the population. National power could not unfold itself any other way, nor could mere affluence of certain people measure progress. For at last analysis nothing was so fine a test for national vigor as a high density per square mile. "The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants" 32-increase, be it noted, not density alone, for when the latter was at its maximum a nation might reach a stationary condition. Smith therefore was in accord with earlier writers like Colbert in France, Seckendorff, Conring, and Justi among the Germans, and Harrington, Temple, Child, Locke, and Petty in his own country. He frequently evinced his indebtedness to others, though giving a moral tinge to his decisions such as others cared little about.

In fact, this moral undercurrent in a sense was the undoing of Smith, for it packs his treatise with inconsistencies that have never ceased to interest critics. Both as pioneer who opened a new field and hence left many vague concepts, and as theist who seeks new norms Smith was likely to puzzle posterity.

How many definitions, for instance, of capital and cost! How variable the stress of different aspects of one and the same thing at different times! How noticeable the mixture of competitive and non-competitive norms! How tantalizing the law of price, whether of wage or of goods! At one time supply and demand as guide to all values; at another cost in effort, or again pecuniary outlay. "Natural value" alongside of alternative costs in Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. 8.

labor; utility ranking with scarcity as a key to value; wage as a rate or as a share assigned to labor in general during a year. It is impossible to tell how much market prices are allowed to deviate from the "natural," or whether prices cover incomes, or not.

In trying to cover all the facts, especially the variety of exceptions for every rule, Smith was enticed into admissions that made a strict logic of methods impossible. There was no doubt that a new vision had been given to the world in his "Wealth of Nations," but it might have been predicted also that a science of what is could not succeed, until the last remnants of a doctrine of Ought, which still clung to Smith, had been disowned as something incongruous and detrimental. And this was a step taken by his successors who understood him only to a certain extent.

CHAPTER FOUR

UTILITARIANISM

I. PREMISES

Environmental Changes from 1776-1900.-Since 1776, when Smith's "Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" was given to an expectant world, our social environment has changed so as to make a comparison of the two eras difficult. When Smith wrote his main work agriculture was still the dominant industry of England. The soil still fed the entire population and even left a slight surplus for export. The population was less than a quarter of what it is to-day. The vestiges of the manor system had not yet disappeared from the landscape, nor from the statute books. The people were, with the exception of a few localities, scattered thinly over the land. Privilege was for the nobility, and the House of Lords kept on disputing supremacy with the Lower House. To gauge the prosperity of the country one traveled over the highways and byways in a coach, estimating crops, reporting on the improvements made on glebe or the commons. The journals of the day and the better known surveys of A. Young remind one of this rural, Merrie Old England. It was not unnatural for Smith to have thought only of wage-carner, landlord, and enterpriser as long as economic organization was simple and the status of each class definitely determined. On the continent too wealth consisted chiefly of land.

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