F.—ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS. 151 
9. That, left to themselves, people will buy whatever they want at 
the cheapest price. This, therefore, must be their interest. And since 
the State is a collection of consumers, and individual interest is social 
interest, the ultimate criterion of the interest of the State is the interest of 
consumers. 
In these nine propositions and their corollaries consists the whole of the 
- generally accepted economic doctrine of the century which followed upon 
the great work of Smith. That they were held to be sufficient and decisive 
as late as 1878 is very authoritatively stated in the most widely circulated 
of treatises on the subject—the lectures of Professor Fawcett, which 
appeared in that year and quickly passed through several editions. ‘ All 
the most effective arguments,’ he remarks, ‘that can now be urged in 
favour of free trade had . . . been stated with the most admirable 
clearness and force by Adam Smith, Ricardo, and other economists. In 
the pages of these writers are to be found many passages which furnish 
the best reply that can be made to the modern opponents of free trade.’ * 
1, 2. The first two of the propositions—that Nature is beneficent, and 
that Nature consists in the unrestricted freedom of every individual to 
pursue his personal desires and interest in his own way—were inextricably 
associated in the minds of the first generation of English economists. It 
will be sufficient for our purpose to consider them together, under the term 
Adam Smith himself employs in a famous passage. When all preference 
or restraint, he says, is completely taken away, it gives place to ‘the simple 
system of Natural Liberty.’? The context shows that by ‘ system ’ Smith 
- means both the doctrine and the condition of things which results when 
the doctrine is put into effect. 
We need not spend much time over the genesis of this doctrine. If we 
knew nothing of Adam Smith but the ‘ Wealth of Nations,’ and took care only 
to read certain parts of it, some sort of case might be made out for the 
view that the doctrine was for Adam Smith an induction from experience : 
this and this and this case of interference with natural liberty, we might 
suppose him to have found, were demonstrably harmful, and therefore, he 
concluded, all interference with natural liberty was harmful. No one need 
deny that some of the instances he cites did lend support to this contention ; 
nor need anyone deny also that the contemporary system of governmental 
or corporate regulation was ill adapted to the needs of the capitalistic era 
then opening. But it would be to disregard all Adam Smith’s antecedents 
as a philosopher ; all that we know of the history and transformation of 
the conception of ‘ Nature’ from the Greek thinkers downward ; all the 
evident affiliation of Smith with his predecessor Hutcheson, and of both 
with Shaftesbury ; and in particular it would be to ignore the essential 
unity of the ‘ Wealth of Nations’ with Smith’s other work, the ‘Theory of 
Moral Sentiments,’ to refuse to recognise that Smith took over the doctrine 
of Natural Liberty from current theology and moral philosophy. The move- 
ment of his mind was fundamentally deductive : natural liberty, he started 
with believing, is beneficent ; he expected therefore to find all interferences 
_ with it harmful, and he had no difficulty in discovering instances. 
1 Pree Trade and Protection, 6th ed. (1885), p. 3. 
2 Wealth of Nations, Bk. IV., ch. ix. (ed. Rogers, ii., 272). 
