“We see,” wrote Malynes, “how one thing driveth or enforceth another, like as in a clock where there are many wheels, the first wheel being stirred driveth the next and that the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the instrument that striketh the clock; or like as in a press going in a strait, where the foremost is driven by him that is next to him, and the next by him that followeth him.”276 The spirit of modern business could hardly be more aptly described. Conservative writers denounced it as fostering a soulless individualism, but, needless to say, their denunciations were as futile as they were justified. It might be possible to put fear into the heart of the village dealer who bought cheap and sold dear, or of the pawnbroker who took a hundred quarters of wheat when he had lent ninety, with the warning that “the devices of men cannot be concealed from Almighty God.” To a great clothier, or to a capitalist like Pallavicino, Spinola, or Thomas Gresham, who managed the Government business in Antwerp, such sentiments were foolishness, and usurious interest appeared, not bad morals, but bad business. Moving, as they did, in a world where loans were made, not to meet the temporary difficulty of an unfortunate neighbor, but as a profitable investment on the part of not too scrupulous business men, who looked after themselves and expected others to do the same, they had scanty sympathy with doctrines which reflected the spirit of mutual aid not unnatural in the small circle of neighbors who formed the ordinary village or borough in rural England.
It was a natural result of their experience that, without the formal enunciation of any theory of economic individualism, they should throw their weight against the traditional restrictions, resent the attempts made by preachers and popular movements to apply doctrines of charity and “good conscience” to the impersonal mechanism of large-scale transactions, and seek to bring public policy more into accordance with their economic practice. The opposition to the Statutes against depopulation offered by the self-interest of the gentry was being supported in the latter years of Elizabeth by free-trade arguments in the House of Commons, and the last Act, which was passed in 1597, expressly allowed land to be laid down to pasture for the purpose of giving it a rest.277 From at any rate the middle of the century, the fixing of prices by municipal authorities and by the Government was regarded with skepticism by the more advanced economic theorists, and towards the end of the century it produced complaints that, since it weakened the farmer’s incentive to grow corn, its results were the precise opposite of those intended.278 As markets widened, the control of the middleman who dealt in wool and grain, though strictly enforced in theory, showed unmistakable signs of breaking down in practice. Gresham attacked the prohibition of usury, and normally stipulated that financiers who subscribed on his inducement to public loans should be indemnified against legal proceedings.279 Nor could he well have done otherwise, for the sentiment of the City was that of the merchant in Wilson’s Dialogue: “What man is so madde to deliver his moneye out of his owne possession for naughte? or whoe is he that will not make of his owne the best he can?”280 With such a wind of doctrine in their sails men were not far from the days of complete freedom of contract.
Most significant of all, economic interests were already appealing to the political theory which, when finally systematized by Locke, was to prove that the State which interferes with property and business destroys its own title to exist. “All free subjects,” declared a Committee of the House of Commons in 1604, “are born inheritable, as to their land, so also to the free exercise of their industry, in those trades whereto they apply themselves and whereby they are to live. Merchandise being the chief and richest of all other, and of greater extent and importance than all the rest, it is against the natural right and liberty of the subjects of England to restrain it into the hands of some few.”281 The process by which natural justice, imperfectly embodied in positive law, was replaced as the source of authority by positive law which might or might not be the expression of natural justice, had its analogy in the rejection by social theory of the whole conception of an objective standard of economic equity. The law of nature had been invoked by medieval writers as a moral restraint upon economic self-interest. By the seventeenth century, a significant revolution had taken place. “Nature” had come to connote, not divine ordinance, but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should be given free play.
The effect of these practical exigencies and intellectual changes was seen in a reversal of policy on the part of the State. In 1571 the Act of 1552, which had prohibited all interest as “a vyce moste odyous and detestable, as in dyvers places of the hollie Scripture it is evydent to be seen,” had been repealed, after a debate in the House which revealed the revolt of the plain man against the theorists who had triumphed twenty years before, and his determination that the law should not impose on business a utopian morality.282 The exaction of interest ceased to be a criminal offence, provided that the rate did not exceed ten percent, though it still remained open to a debtor, in the improbable event of his thinking it expedient to jeopardize his chance of future advances, to take civil proceedings to recover any payment made in excess of the principal. This qualified condonation of usury
