ii6 History of the English Landed Interest. 



autlior admitted, quite as well as Smith himself ; and during 

 the last two decades of the eighteenth century extracts were 

 more and more quoted in both Houses of Parliament. It is 

 most important to bear this in mind, since, though physiocratic 

 doctrines may have had little to do with our scheme of 

 national taxation (a system, be it remembered, which ignored 

 all other sources of revenue save the land), there are strong 

 reasons to assume that these same doctrines prolonged its exist- 

 ence long after altered circumstances had rendered it unjust. 



It is not to be supposed that Adam Smith produced any new 

 economic system. His mission in the world of philosophic 

 thought has always seemed to us to have been not so much 

 that of an inventor as of a destroyer. In the systems which 

 he overthrew, there were many isolated ideas which survived 

 his adverse judgment. Out of such materials he built up a 

 structure, which, to his contemporaries who regarded it as a 

 whole, appeared novel, but, when picked to pieces by later 

 critics, has been found to contain many familiar doctrines of 

 the mercantilists and physiocrats. 



So far as we have now described his views, he was in entire 

 accord with the philosophy of the French school, which had 

 resisted the attractions of the mercantile theory and gone back 

 to the soil as the origin of all wealth. But there they had 

 stopped short, as if overwhelmed by the discovery of a colossal 

 truth. It was left for their Scotch brother to drag them on- 

 ward to a practical use of what they had opened out to view. 

 The treasure they had hit upon might, for any further effort of 

 theirs, have lain for ever in its mother earth, had not Smith 

 shown them that labour was the one universal agent for con- 

 verting it into a nation's wealth. To encourage, foster, and 

 increase labour was our groa,t countryman's secret of successful 

 management. Hitherto the politicians of England had re- 

 stricted, hampered, and repelled it. 



Even here, however. Smith was not originating any new 

 theory ; for Hobbes had shown that "plenty dependeth next 

 to God's favour on the labour and industry of man." ^ Locke, 



* Leviathan^ Idol, ch. xxiv. 



