160 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
Greek view of the State. We have seen the High-State doctrine confirmed 
by the visible efficacy of much positive State action. We have seen it, 
more recently, somewhat discredited by its association in Germany with 
a deification of the State which has seemed immoral; and although the 
State in all countries undertook during the Great War, with quite unex- 
pected success, novel functions, its activity has, for the time, undoubtedly 
left behind a certain soreness in some of the business interests affected. 
Moreover, there has been much analysis in recent years of the conceptions 
Society and State ; much consideration of the place of groups or associations 
within the State, and of a conceivable partition of functions. There are 
schools of political thought who are so indignant with the use which 
Governments calling themselves ‘ the State’ have made of their powers 
that they propose to abolish the State altogether : although their measures, 
when they seize power, indicate clearly enough that what they believe in is 
something similar under another name. For all these reasons, I naturally 
do not intend to set forth any view of my own, either as to Society or the 
State. I am content to have reminded you of the view entertained by 
the economists of the century we are considering. I do not suppose it 
would satisfy any serious thinker now. He might think Free Trade 
expedient ; but he would not base it upon so one-sided and unhistorical a 
conception of the social union. 
5. The idea that countries differ from one another in their physical pro- 
ductive resources, and that this is the occasion and justification of foreign 
trade, had been a commonplace with writers centuries before Adam Smith. 
It is to be found well developed in the letters of Seneca ; it reappears in 
the great encyclopzdic treatise of Aquinas ;** and it was transmitted to 
the modern world by Grotius. ®* But there can hardly be any doubt that 
it came to Adam Smith from the well-known essays ‘ Of the Balance of Trade’ 
and ‘ Of the Jealousy of Trade,’ published by his friend David Hume in 1752 
and 1758. Hume had written: ‘ Nature, by giving a diversity of geniuses, 
climates and soils to different nations, has secured their mutual intercourse 
and commerce so long as they all remain industrious and civilised.’ And 
he had furnished Smith and his successors with a convenient shorter 
expression by remarking: ‘When any commodity is denominated the 
staple of a kingdom, it is supposed’ (7.e. understood) ‘ that this kingdom 
has some peculiar and natural advantages 4° for raising the commodity.’ 
Hume also led the way for Smith to draw the conclusion that inter- 
ference with the international trade which would arise from the divergency 
in national advantages would be unwise. And it is an illustration of the 
38 This learning is not my own. References will be found in Kautz, Geschichtliche 
Entwickelung der Nat. Oek., pp. 156, 215. 
89 Grotius (De Jure Belli ac Pacis, I1., 2, 13, 5) quotes from the Greek rhetorician 
Libanius, of the fourth century after Christ, a passage which he translates thus : 
‘ Deus non omnia omnibus terrae partibus concessit, sed per regiones dona sua distri- 
buit, quo homines alii aliorum indigentes ope societatem colerent. Itaque merca- 
turam excitavit.’ 
40 The expression had been used, in 1691, by John Locke, in his Considerations of 
the Lowering of Interest (Reprint in Essays ; Ward, Lock & Co., p. 566). He says, of 
Commerce ; ‘ For this the advantages of our situation, as well as the industry and 
application of our people . . . do naturally fitus. By this, . . . trade left almost to 
itself, and assisted only by the natural advantages above mentioned, brought us in 
plenty of riches.’ But Locke was far from drawing the Free Trade conclusion. 
