A demonstration of a somewhat similar character has been attempted by the Hedonistic school. They have shown how free competition always tends to direct production into such channels as will result in maximum utility, or, in other words, that it affords the best method of satisfying the actual demands of the market. But they have been very careful to note that social utility and ophelimity are two very different expressions that must never be confused, and that they have failed to find any scientific test of social utility. Smith’s argument is unsatisfactory, and its foundation untrustworthy. We do not forget that his optimism is based not so much upon this specious demonstration as upon the great number of observations which he had occasion to make in the course of his work. This idea of a harmony between private interest and the general well-being of society was not put forward as a rigidly demonstrable _a priori_ theory, open to no exceptions. It was rather a general view of the whole position—the conclusion drawn from repeated observations, the _résumé_ of a detailed inquiry which had covered every corner of the economic field. A particular process of reasoning may have helped to confirm this conclusion, but the reasoning itself was largely based upon experience, the universal experience of history. It was the study of this experience that led to the discovery of a “vital” principle of health and progress in the “body social.” Smith would have been the first to oppose the incorporation of his belief in any dogma. He was content to say that “most frequently” and in a “majority of cases” general interest _was_ satisfied by the spontaneous action of private interest. He was also the first to point out instances—in the case of merchants and manufacturers, for example—where the particular and the general interest came into conflict. We might cite many characteristic passages in which he takes pains to qualify his optimism. Absolute his optimism was not, neither was it universal. In fact, it would not be difficult to prove that it was never intended to apply to anything other than production. Nowhere does the great Scotch economist pretend that the present distribution of wealth is the justest possible—a trait that distinguishes him from the optimists of Bastiat’s school. His optimism deserted him when he reached that portion of his subject. On the contrary, he showed that landed proprietors as well as capitalists “love to reap where they have not sown,” that inequalities in social position give masters an advantage in bargaining with their men.[210] In more than one passage he speaks of interest and rent as deductions from the produce of labour.[211] Smith, indeed, might well be regarded as a forerunner of socialism. There is no difficulty in believing, so far as the experience of old countries goes, that “rent and profit eat up wages and the two superior orders of people oppress the inferior one.”[212]