THREE SYSTEMS OE POLITICAL ECONOMY. 
697 
every sea. The centre of gravity of English society was altered, and 
the change in the possession of political power had to follow the 
change in wealth production. 
The great writer who gave expression to the wants of the new 
and rapidly growing industry was Adam Smith. His great book, 
“The Wealth of Nations/’ was published just as England was 
entering on her new career. Although stimulated to a large degree 
by Erench writers, he wrote under the inspiration of the conditions 
around him in Scotland and England, He gave voice to the wants of 
the new school, and especially to its great want — freedom of move- 
ment. Governments had always been possessed with the idea that 
they could do something for industry, and they certainly had done 
something for land-owners. Adam Smith pleaded for freedom of trade 
and the abolition of restrictions. His work was the hornbook of 
successive generations of statesmen, and few closet philosophers have 
ever had so direct an influence on Budgets. All the legislation that 
tended to liberate trade proved a success for its special purpose, 
for the liberated trade answered by immediate expansion. The idea 
more and more took possession of people that trade — including in that 
expression both manufactures and interchange — was the great interest 
of the country ; that the one thing needed for the prosperity of the 
nation was to look after trade, and that all other interests would 
benefit in its wake. The great contest between the trading class and 
the older possessors of political power took place during the battle 
over the Corn Laws, when trade asserted its supremacy. 
And now once more the centre of gravity is shifting. We find 
ourselves in an age when the whole trading class is condemned and 
ridiculed as bourgeois. The factory system, while it has realised its 
great aim of cheap production, has developed special social evils of its 
own. In this world there seems to be no such thing as an exclusive 
blessing. Every advantage gained has its shadow behind it. Eactory 
laws in England did a great deal to prevent the overwork of women 
and young children, and the education laws secured to all children the 
power to read and write. But that has dealt with only part of the 
difficulty; the greater and more serious work remains behind. The 
whole adult male class is claiming, with more or less clearness and 
firmness, some protection against excessive competition, and some 
guarantee against want of work. A wholly new system of political 
economy is being formulated, and it is being shaped exclusively from 
the point of view of the receiver of wages — a point of view wholly 
different from that of the land-owner or that of the trader. Marx has 
done the most to give form to the complaint of the worker and to argue 
that lie is exploited and robbed by his employer. But it cannot he 
said that the new system is definitely embodied in any one treatise, 
9 for it occupies all the intermediate ground between a system of 
restrictions on existing abuses and the establishment of thorough- 
going socialism. Still the main idea that interpenetrates the writings 
of all radical reformers belonging to ihe wage-getting class is that 
their class is the only one that needs to be considered. Let the 
Government do full justice to the workman, and then there will be 
no need to care for anyone else. Socialism goes so far as to say that 
there need not be anyone else, and indeed that there ought not to 
he — that Government ought to extinguish every employer and every 
