Therein, of course, may be found the main secret of his omissions. The problem of labor finds no place in his book. The things that the poor have absent from their lives, that concept of a national minimum below which no State can hope to fulfil even the meanest of its aims, of these he has no conception. Rather the note of the book is a quiet optimism, impressed by the possibilities of constant improvement which lie imbedded in the human impulse to better itself. What he did not see is the way in which the logical outcome of the system he describes may well be the attainment of great wealth at a price in human cost that is beyond its worth. Therein, it is clear, all individualistic theories of the state miss the true essence of the social bond. Those who came after Adam Smith saw only half his problem. He wrote a consumer's theory of value. But whereas he had in mind a happy and contented people, the economics of Ricardo and Malthus seized upon a single element in human nature as that which alone the State must serve. Freedom from restraint came ultimately to mean a judgment upon national well-being in terms of the volume of trade. "It is not with happiness," said Nassau Senior, "but with wealth that I am concerned as a political economist; and I am not only justified in omitting, but am perhaps bound to omit, all considerations which have no influence upon wealth." In such an aspect, it was natural for the balance of investigation to swing towards the study of the technique of production; and with the growing importance of capital, as machinery was introduced, the worker, without difficulty, became an adjunct, easily replaced, to the machine. What was remembered then was the side of Adam Smith which looked upon enlightened selfishness as the key to social good. Regulation became anathema even when the evils it attempted to restrain were those which made the mass of the people incapable of citizenship. Even national education was regarded as likely to destroy initiative; or, as a pauper's dole which men of self-respect would regard with due abhorrence. The State, in short, ceased to concern itself with justice save insofar as the administration of a judicial code spelled the protection of the new industrial system. Nothing is more striking in the half-century after Adam Smith than the optimism of the economist and the business man in contrast to the hopeless despair of labor. That men can organize to improve their lot was denied with emphasis, so that until Francis Place even the workers themselves were half-convinced. The manufacturers were the State; and the whole intellectual strength of economics was massed to prove the rightness of the equation. The literature of protest, men like Hall and Thompson, Hodgskin and Bray, exerted no influence upon the legislation of the time; and Robert Owen was deemed an amiable eccentric rather than the prophet of a new hope. The men who succeeded, as Wilberforce, carried out to the letter the