154 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual 
motion the industry of mankind.’ 1° 
One more quotation will enable us, by the help of a phrase which re- 
appears in the ‘Wealth of Nations,’ to pass from the ethical to the economic 
treatise. It is the passage in which he explains how beneficial to society 
in general and the poor in particular are * the luxury and caprice’ of the 
rich. ‘They consume little more than the poor; and in spite of their 
natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own 
conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of 
all the thousands whom they employ be the gratification of their own vain 
and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their 
improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same 
distribution of the necessaries of life which would have been made had 
the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants ; 
and thus, without intending at, without knowing it, advance the interest 
of the society and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When 
Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot 
nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition.’ 4 
You will have been anticipating the passage I now go on to in the 
‘Wealth of Nations.’ It is that in which he explains how it is that ‘every 
individual,’ by directing the domestic industry of a country ‘in such 
a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value,’ though ‘he 
intends only his own gain,’ ‘is in this, as in many other cases, led by an 
invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his entention.’ * 
You observe how the very terms of the former treatise reappear ; not only 
the ‘invisible hand,’ but also ‘intention ’ and ‘ end’; and you will realise 
that ‘in many other cases’ is not a qualification he intends to be taken 
seriously. The ‘invisible hand’ is not, as some have supposed, the chance 
survival of a picturesque literary phrase ; the idea, in that or some equiva- 
lent phrase, is the leit-motif of all his writing. 
However the doctrine grew up in Smith’s mind that—as one of my 
predecessors in this Chair has expressed it—‘ the natural forces of human 
desires and aversions... will naturally, and without conscious intention on 
the part of the individual, lead to the greatest advantage of society,’ 
and however much he may have supposed himself to have reached it by 
observation of surrounding facts, there can be no doubt, as that pre- 
decessor of mine has pointed out, that it “became the starting point’ of ‘the 
school of propagandists’ who gave Political Economy its English con- 
notation.” 
So much the starting point that it was unconsciously assumed. It hardly 
occurred to most writers explicitly to set it forth ; and here, as elsewhere, 
we can be grateful to McCulloch for proclaiming what others were thinking. 
‘The principles on which the production and accumulation of wealth 
depend are inherent in our nature’... and again: ‘ The principles which 
form the basis of this science make a part of the original constitution 
of man and of the physical world.’ 4% And Buckle, summing up with 
10 Part IV., ch. i. (Reprint, p. 162.) 
11 [bid. (Reprint, p. 163.) 
* W.of N., Bk. IV., ch. ii. (II. 28.) 
12 Sir H. Llewellyn Smith, at the Meeting of 1910. 
13 Principles (1825), p. 15. (Reprint, p. 16.) 
