The most important of such rights are property rights, and property rights attach mainly, though not, of course, exclusively, to the higher orders of men, who hold the tangible, material “stock” of society. Those who do not subscribe to the company have no legal claim to a share in the profits, though they have a moral claim on the charity of their superiors. Hence the curious phraseology which treats almost all below the nobility, gentry and freeholders as “the poor”—and the poor, it is well known, are of two kinds, “the industrious poor,” who work for their betters, and “the idle poor,” who work for themselves. Hence the unending discussions as to whether “the laboring poor” are to be classed among the “productive” or “unproductive” classes—whether they are, or are not, really worth their keep. Hence the indignant repudiation of the suggestion that any substantial amelioration of their lot could be effected by any kind of public policy. “It would be easier, where property was well secured, to live without money than without poor, … who, as they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving”; the poor “have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure”; “to make society happy, it is necessary that great numbers should be wretched as well as poor.”293 Such sentences from a work printed in 1714 are not typical. But they are straws which show how the wind is blowing.
In such an atmosphere temperatures were naturally low and equable, and enthusiasm, if not a lapse in morals, was an intellectual solecism and an error in taste. Religious thought was not immune from the same influence. It was not merely that the Church, which, as much as the State, was the heir of the Revolution settlement, reproduced the temper of an aristocratic society, as it reproduced its class organization and economic inequalities, and was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position, which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of Englishmen. Not less significant was the fact that, apart from certain groups and certain questions, it accepted the prevalent social philosophy and adapted its teaching to it. The age in which political theory was cast in the mould of religion had yielded to one in which religious thought was no longer an imperious master, but a docile pupil. Conspicuous exceptions like Law, who reasserted with matchless power the idea that Christianity implies a distinctive way of life, or protests like Wesley’s sermon on The Use of Money, merely heighten the impression of a general acquiescence in the conventional ethics. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors. It was the natural counterpart of a social philosophy which repudiated teleology, and which substituted the analogy of a self-regulating mechanism, moved by the weights and pulleys of economic motives, for the theory which had regarded society as an organism composed of different classes united by their common subordination to a spiritual purpose.
Such an attitude, with its emphasis on the economic harmony of apparently conflicting interests, left small scope for moral casuistry. The materials for the reformer were, indeed, abundant enough. The phenomena of early commercial capitalism—consider only the orgy of financial immorality which culminated in 1720—were of a kind which might have been expected to shock even the not oversensitive conscience of the eighteenth century. Two centuries before, the Fuggers had been denounced by preachers and theologians; and, compared with the men who engineered the South Sea Bubble, the Fuggers had been innocents. In reality, religious opinion was quite unmoved by the spectacle. The traditional scheme of social ethics had been worked out in a simpler age; in the commercial England of banking, and shipping, and joint-stock enterprise, it seemed, and was called, a Gothic superstition. From the Restoration onward it was quietly dropped. The usurer and engrosser disappear from episcopal charges. In the popular manual called The Whole Duty of Man,294 first published in 1658, and widely read during the following century, extortion and oppression still figure as sins, but the attempt to define what they are is frankly abandoned. If preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words, “trade is one thing and religion is another,” they imply a not very different conclusion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions between them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of a providential plan. “National commerce, good morals and good government,” wrote Dean Tucker, of whom Warburton unkindly said that religion was his trade, and trade his religion, “are but part of one general scheme, in the designs of Providence.”
Naturally, on such a view, it was unnecessary for the Church to insist on commercial morality, since sound morality coincided with commercial wisdom. The existing order, except in so far as the shortsighted enactments of Governments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the order established by nature was the order established by God. Most educated men, in the middle of the century, would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of Pope:
Thus God and Nature formed the general frame,
And bade self-love and social be the same.
Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical examination of institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian charity only those parts of life which could be reserved for philanthropy, precisely because they fell outside
