A manlier, because a juster, philosophy enabled Bastiat rather to say with Edmund Burke, “Art is man’s nature.” Looking at the existing fabric and mechanism of Society, and the beautiful harmony of the Economic laws which regulate it, he could see nothing to warrant constant legislative tampering with the affairs of trade. He had faith in moral and material progress under the empire of Freedom. Sweeping away all Socialist Utopias and artificial systems of social organization, he pointed to Society as it exists, and exclaimed, ‹Digitus Dei est hic›. Unlike the sickly poet, he believed that the same Good and Wise Being who created both town and country, upholds and sustains them both; and that the laws of Value and Exchange, left to their own free and beneficent action, are as much His ordinance, as the laws of motion, attraction, or chemical affinity.[10] Engaged upon the second volume of the ‹Harmonies›, Bastiat found his subject growing upon him, and discovered, as he thought, when too late, that he had not in the first instance perceived all its bearings. He felt, as he said, crushed by the mass [p030] of harmonies which presented themselves to him on every side; and a posthumous note, found among his papers, informs us that this expansion of his subject under his hand had led him to think of recasting the entire work. “I had thought at first,” he says, “to begin with the exposition of ‹Economic Harmonies›, and, consequently, to treat only of subjects purely economical—‹Value›, ‹Property›, ‹Wealth›, ‹Competition›, ‹Wages›, ‹Population›, ‹Money›, ‹Credit›, etc. Afterwards, if I had had time and strength, I should have directed the attention of the reader to the larger subject of ‹Social Harmonies›, and treated of the ‹Human Constitution›, ‹Social Motives›, ‹Responsibility›, ‹Solidarity›, etc. The work thus conceived[11] had been begun, when I saw that it was better to mingle together than to separate these two classes of considerations. But then logic required that the study of Man should precede the Economic investigations; and—there was no longer time.”