Enlightened selfishness is thus the root of prosperity; but we must not fall into the easy fallacy which makes Smith deaf to the plaint of the poor. He urged the employer to have regard to the health and welfare of the worker, a regard which was the voice of reason and humanity. Where there was conflict between love of the _status quo_ and a social good which Revolution alone could achieve, he did not, at least in the _Moral Sentiments_, hesitate to choose the latter. Order was, for the most part, indispensable; but "the greatest and noblest of all characters" he made the reformer of the State. Yet he is too impressed by the working of natural economic laws to belittle their influence. Employers, in his picture, are little capable of benevolence or charity. Their rule is the law of supply and demand and not the Sermon on the Mount. They combine without hesitation to depress wages to the lowest point of subsistence. They seize every occasion of commercial misfortune to make better terms for themselves; and the greater the poverty the more submissive do servants become so that scarcity is naturally regarded as more favorable to industry. Obviously enough, the inner hinge of all this argument is Smith's conception of nature. Nor can there be much doubt of what he thought its inner substance. Facile distinctions such as the effort of Buckle to show that while in the _Moral Sentiments_ Adam Smith was dealing with the unselfish side of man's nature, in the _Wealth of Nations_ he was dealing with a group of facts which required the abstraction of such altruistic elements, are really beside the point. Nature for Smith is simply the spontaneous action of human character unchecked by hindrances of State. It is, as Bonar has aptly said, "a vindication of the unconscious law present in the separate actions of men when these actions are directed by a certain strong personal motive." Adam Smith's argument is an assumption that the facts can be made to show the relative powerlessness of institutions in the face of economic laws grounded in human psychology. The psychology itself is relatively simple, and, at least in the _Wealth of Nations_ not greatly different from the avowed assumptions of utilitarianism. He emphasizes the strength of reason in the economic field, and his sense that it enables men to judge much better of their best interests than an external authority can hope to do. And therefore the practices accomplished by this reason are those in which the impulses of men are to be found. The order they represent is the natural order; and whatever hinders its full operation is an unwise check upon the things for which men strive.