More and more plainly he was, however, forced to realise that it was not within his power to check the new development of commerce; he, nevertheless, stuck by his earlier views. He was also, and to some extent justifiably, shocked at the growing luxury which had made its way into the burgher class and into the towns generally in the train of foreign trade. Instead of “staying in his place and being content with a moderate living,” “everyone wants to be a merchant and to grow rich.”[241] “We despise the arts and languages,” he says, “but refuse to do without the foreign wares which are neither necessary nor profitable to us, but [the expenses of] which lay our very bones bare. Do we not thereby show ourselves to be true Germans, i.e. fools and beasts?”[242] God “has given us, like other nations, sufficient wool, hair, flax and everything else necessary for suitable and becoming clothing, but now men squander fortunes on silk, satin, cloth of gold and all sorts of foreign stuffs.… We could also do with less spices.” People might say he was trying to “put down the wholesale trade and commerce. But I do my duty. If things are not improved in the community, at least let whoever can amend.”[243] “I cannot see that much in the way of good has ever come to a country through commerce.”[244] He refused to follow the more luxurious mode of living which had become the rule in the towns as a result of trade, but insisted on leading the more simple life to which he had throughout been accustomed. For the good of the people, poverty or simplicity was on the whole more profitable than riches. “People say, and with truth, ‘It takes a strong man to bear prosperity,’ and ‘A man can endure many things but not good fortune.’ … If we have food and clothing let us esteem it enough. For the cities of the plain which God destroyed it would have been better, if, instead of abounding in wealth, everything had been of the dearest, and there had been less superfluity.”[245]—“What worse and more wanton can be conceived of than the mad mob and the yokels when they are gorged with food and have the reins in their hands.”[246] Hence he took a “tolerable maintenance” as he expresses it, i.e. the mode of living suitable to a man’s state, as the basis of a fair wage. The question of wages must in the last instance, he thinks, depend on the question of maintenance. Luther, like Calvin, did not go any further in this matter. “Their conservative ideas saw in high wages only the demoralisation of the working classes.”[247] Luther’s remarks on this subject “recall the words of Calvin, viz. that the people must always be kept in poverty in order that they may remain obedient.”[248]