In practice, since new class interests and novel ideas had arisen, but had not yet wholly submerged those which preceded them, every shade of opinion, from that of the pious burgess, who protested indignantly against being saddled with a vicar who took a penny in the shilling, to the latitudinarianism of the cosmopolitan financier, to whom the confusion of business with morals was a vulgar delusion, was represented in the economic ethics of Elizabethan England.
As far as the smaller property-owners were concerned, the sentiment of laymen differed, on the whole, less widely from the doctrines expounded by divines, than it did from the individualism which was beginning to carry all before it among the leaders of the world of business. Against the rising financial interests of the day were arrayed the stolid conservatism of the peasantry and the humbler bourgeoisie, whose conception of social expediency was the defence of customary relations against innovation, and who regarded the growth of this new power with something of the same jealous hostility as they opposed to the economic radicalism of the enclosing landlord. At bottom, it was an instinctive movement of self-protection. Free play for the capitalist seemed to menace the independence of the small producer, who tilled the nation’s fields and wove its cloth. The path down which the financier beguiles his victims may seem at first to be strewn with roses; but at the end of it lies—incredible nightmare—a régime of universal capitalism, in which peasant and small master will have been merged in a propertyless proletariat, and “the riches of the city of London, and in effect of all this realm, shall be at that time in the hands of a few men having unmerciful hearts.”[54]
Against the landlord who enclosed commons, converted arable to pasture, and rack-rented his tenants, local resentment, unless supported by the Government, was powerless. Against the engrosser, however, it mobilized the traditional machinery of maximum prices and market regulations, and dealt with the usurer as best it could, by presenting him before the justices in Quarter Sessions, by advancing money from the municipal exchequer to assist his victims, and even, on occasion, by establishing a public pawnshop, with a monopoly of the right to make loans, as a protection to the inhabitants against extreme “usurers and extortioners.” The commonest charity of the age, which was the establishment of a fund to make advances without interest to tradesmen, was inspired by similar motives. Its aim was to enable the young artisan or shopkeeper, the favorite victim of the money-lender, to acquire the indispensable “stock,” without which he could not set up in business.[55]
The issues which confronted the Government were naturally more complicated, and its attitude was more ambiguous. The pressure of commercial interests growing in wealth and influence, its own clamorous financial necessities, the mere logic of economic development, made it out of the question for it to contemplate, even if it had been disposed to do so, the rigorous economic discipline desired by the divines. Tradition, a natural conservatism, the apprehension of public disorder caused by enclosures or by distress among the industrial population, a belief in its own mission as the guardian of “good order” in trade, not unmingled with a hope that the control of economic affairs might be made to yield agreeable financial pickings, gave it a natural bias to a policy which aimed at drawing all the threads of economic life into the hands of a paternal monarchy.
In the form which the system assumed under Elizabeth, considerations of public policy, which appealed to the State, were hardly distinguishable from considerations of social morality, which appealed to the Church. As a result of the Reformation the relations previously existing between the Church and the State had been almost exactly reversed. In the Middle Ages the former had been, at least in theory, the ultimate authority on questions of public and private morality, while the latter was the police-officer which enforced its decrees. In the sixteenth century, the Church became the ecclesiastical department of the State, and religion was used to lend a moral sanction to secular social policy. But the religious revolution had not destroyed the conception of a single society, of which Church and State were different aspects; and, when the canon law became “the King’s ecclesiastical law of England,” the jurisdiction of both inevitably tended to merge. Absorbing the ecclesiastical authority into itself, the Crown had its own reasons of political expediency for endeavoring to maintain traditional standards of social conduct, as an antidote for what Cecil called “the license grown by liberty of the Gospel.” Ecclesiastics, in their turn, were public officers—under Elizabeth the bishop was normally also a justice of the peace—and relied on secular machinery to enforce, not only religious conformity, but Christian morality, because both were elements in a society in which secular and spiritual interests had not yet been completely disentangled from each other. “We mean by the Commonwealth,” wrote Hooker, “that society with relation unto all public affairs thereof, only the matter of true religion accepted; by the Church, the same society, with only reference unto the matter of true religion, without any other affairs besides.”[56]
In economic and social, as in ecclesiastical, matters, the opening years of Elizabeth were a period of conservative reconstruction. The psychology of a nation which lives predominantly by the land is in sharp contrast with that of a commercial society. In the latter, when all goes well, continuous expansion is taken for granted as the rule of life, new horizons are constantly opening, and the catchword of politics is the encouragement of enterprise. In the former, the number of niches into which each successive generation must be fitted is strictly limited; movement means disturbance, for, as one man rises, another is thrust down; and the object of statesmen is, not to foster individual initiative, but to prevent social dislocation. It was in this mood that Tudor Privy Councils approached questions of social policy and industrial organization. Except when they were diverted by financial interests, or lured into ambitious, and usually unsuccessful, projects for promoting economic development, their ideal was, not progress, but stability. Their enemies were disorder, and the restless appetites which, since they led to the encroachment of class on class, were thought to provoke it. Distrusting economic individualism for reasons of state as heartily as did churchmen for reasons of religion, their aim was to crystallize existing class relationships by submitting them to the pressure, at once restrictive and protective, of a paternal Government, vigilant to detect all movements which menaced the established order, and alert to suppress them.
In spite of the swift expansion of commerce in the latter part of the century, the words of Ulysses continued for long to express the official attitude.
The practical application of such conceptions was an elaborate system of what might be called, to use a modern analogy, “controls.” Wages, the movement of labor, the entry into a trade, dealings in grain and in wool, methods of cultivation, methods of manufacture, foreign exchange business, rates of interest—all are controlled, partly by Statute, but still more by the administrative activity of the Council. In theory, nothing is too small or too great to escape the eyes of an omniscient State. Does a landowner take advantage of the ignorance of peasants and the uncertainty of the law to enclose commons or evict copyholders? The Council, while protesting that it does not intend to hinder him from asserting his rights at common law, will intervene to stop gross cases of oppression, to prevent poor men from being made the victims of legal chicanery and intimidation, to settle disputes by common sense and moral pressure, to remind the aggressor that he is bound “rather to consider what is agreeable ... to the use of this State and for the good of the comon wealthe, than to seeke the uttermost advantage that a landlord for his particular profit maie take amonge his tenaunts.”[57] Have prices been raised by a bad harvest? The Council will issue a solemn denunciation of the covetousness of speculators, “in conditions more like to wolves or cormorants than to natural men,”[58] who take advantage of the dearth to exploit public necessities; will instruct the Commissioners of Grain and Victuals to suspend exports; and will order justices to inspect barns, ration supplies, and compel farmers to sell surplus stocks at a fixed price. Does the collapse of the continental market threaten distress in the textile districts? The Council will put pressure on clothiers to find work for the operatives, “this being the rule by which the wool-grower, the clothier and merchant must be governed, that whosoever had a part of the gaine in profitable times ... must now, in the decay of trade ... beare a part of the publicke losses, as may best conduce to the good of the publicke and the maintenance of the generall trade.”[59] Has the value of sterling fallen on the Antwerp market? The Council will consider pegging the exchanges, and will even attempt to nationalize foreign exchange business by prohibiting private transactions altogether.[60] Are local authorities negligent in the administration of the Poor Law? The Council, which insists on regular reports as to the punishment of vagrants, the relief of the impotent, and the steps taken to provide materials on which to employ the able-bodied, inundates them with exhortations to mend their ways and with threats of severer proceedings if they fail. Are tradesmen in difficulties? The Council, which keeps sufficiently in touch with business conditions to know when the difficulties of borrowers threaten a crisis, endeavors to exercise a moderating influence by making an example of persons guilty of flagrant extortion, or by inducing the parties to accept a compromise. A mortgagee accused of “hard and unchristianly dealing” is ordered to restore the land which he has seized, or to appear before the Council. A creditor who has been similarly “hard and unconscionable” is committed to the Fleet. The justices of Norfolk are instructed to put pressure on a money-lender who has taken “very unjust and immoderate advantage by way of usury.” The bishop of Exeter is urged to induce a usurer in his diocese to show “a more Christian and charitable consideration of these his neighbors.” A nobleman has released two offenders imprisoned by the High Commission for the Province of York for having “taken usury contrary to the laws of God and of the realm,” and is ordered at once to recommit them. No Government can face with equanimity a state of things in which large numbers of respectable tradesmen may be plunged into bankruptcy. In times of unusual depression, the Council’s intervention to prevent creditors from pressing their claims to the hilt was so frequent as to create the impression of something like an informal moratorium.[61]
The Governments of the Tudors and, still more, of the first two Stuarts, were masters of the art of disguising commonplace, and sometimes sordid, motives beneath a glittering façade of imposing principles. In spite of its lofty declarations of a disinterested solicitude for the public welfare, the social policy of the monarchy not only was as slipshod in execution as it was grandiose in design, but was not seldom perverted into measures disastrous to its ostensible ends, both by the sinister pressure of sectional interests, and by the insistent necessities of an empty exchequer. Its fundamental conception, however—the philosophy of the thinkers and of the few statesmen who rose above immediate exigencies to consider the significance of the system in its totality—had a natural affinity with the doctrines which commended themselves to men of religion. It was of an ordered and graded society, in which each class performed its allotted function, and was secured such a livelihood, and no more than such a livelihood, as was proportioned to its status. “God and the Kinge,” wrote one who had labored much, amid grave personal dangers, for the welfare of his fellows, “hathe not sent us the poore lyvinge we have, but to doe services therfore amonge our neighbours abroade.”[62] The divines who fulminated against the uncharitable covetousness of the extortionate middleman, the grasping money-lender, or the tyrannous landlord, saw in the measures by which the Government endeavored to suppress the greed of individuals or the collision of classes a much needed cement of social solidarity, and appealed to Cæsar to redouble his penalties upon an economic license which was hateful to God. The statesmen concerned to prevent agitation saw in religion the preservative of order, and the antidote for the cupidity or ambition which threatened to destroy it, and reënforced the threat of temporal penalties with arguments that would not have been out of place in the pulpit. To both alike religion is concerned with something more than personal salvation. It is the sanction of social duties and the spiritual manifestation of the corporate life of a complex, yet united, society. To both the State is something more than an institution created by material necessities or political convenience. It is the temporal expression of spiritual obligations. It is a link between the individual soul and that supernatural society of which all Christian men are held to be members. It rests not merely on practical convenience, but on the will of God.
Of that philosophy, the classical expression, at once the most catholic, the most reasonable and the most sublime, is the work of Hooker. What it meant to one cast in a narrower mould, pedantic, irritable and intolerant, yet not without the streak of harsh nobility which belongs to all who love an idea, however unwisely, more than their own ease, is revealed in the sermons and the activity of Laud. Laud’s intellectual limitations and practical blunders need no emphasis. If his vices made him intolerable to the most powerful forces of his own age, his virtues were not of a kind to commend him to those of its successor, and history has been hardly more merciful to him than were his political opponents. But an intense conviction of the fundamental solidarity of all the manifold elements in a great community, a grand sense of the dignity of public duties, a passionate hatred for the self-seeking pettiness of personal cupidities and sectional interests—these qualities are not among the weaknesses against which the human nature of ordinary men requires to be most upon its guard, and these qualities Laud possessed, not only in abundance, but to excess. His worship of unity was an idolatry, his detestation of faction a superstition. Church and State are one Jerusalem: “Both Commonwealth and Church are collective bodies, made up of many into one; and both so near allied that the one, the Church, can never subsist but in the other, the Commonwealth; nay, so near, that the same men, which in a temporal respect make the Commonwealth, do in a spiritual make the Church.”[63] Private and public interests are inextricably interwoven. The sanction of unity is religion. The foundation of unity is justice: “God will not bless the State, if kings and magistrates do not execute judgment, if the widow and the fatherless have cause to cry out against the ‘thrones of justice.’”[64]
To a temper so permeated with the conception that society is an organism compact of diverse parts, and that the grand end of government is to maintain their coöperation, every social movement or personal motive which sets group against group, or individual against individual, appears, not the irrepressible energy of life, but the mutterings of chaos. The first demon to be exorcised is party, for Governments must “entertain no private business,” and “parties are ever private ends.”[65] The second is the self-interest which leads the individual to struggle for riches and advancement. “There is no private end, but in something or other it will be led to run cross the public; and, if gain come in, though it be by ‘making shrines for Diana,’ it is no matter with them though Ephesus be in an uproar for it.”[66] For Laud, the political virtues, by which he understands subordination, obedience, a willingness to sacrifice personal interests for the good of the community, are as much part of the Christian’s religion as are the duties of private life; and, unlike some of those who sigh for social unity today, he is as ready to chastise the rich and powerful, who thwart the attainment of that ideal, as he is to preach it to the humble. To talk of holiness and to practice injustice is mere hypocrisy. Man is born a member of a society and is dedicated by religion to the service of his fellows. To repudiate the obligation is to be guilty of a kind of political atheism.
“If any man be so addicted to his private, that he neglect the common, state, he is void of the sense of piety and wisheth peace and happiness to himself in vain. For whoever he be, he must live in the body of the Commonwealth, and in the body of the Church.”[67] To one holding such a creed economic individualism was hardly less abhorrent than religious nonconformity, and its repression was a not less obvious duty; for both seemed incompatible with the stability of a society in which Commonwealth and Church were one. It is natural, therefore, that Laud’s utterances and activities in the matter of social policy should have shown a strong bias in favor of the control of economic relations by an authoritarian State, which reached its climax in the eleven years of personal government. It was a moment when, partly in continuance of the traditional policy of protecting peasants and maintaining the supply of grain, partly for less reputable reasons of finance, the Government was more than usually active in harrying the depopulating landlord. The Council gave sympathetic consideration to petitions from peasants begging for protection or redress, and in 1630 directions were issued to the justices of five midland counties to remove all enclosures made in the last five years, on the ground that they resulted in depopulation and were particularly harmful in times of dearth. In 1632, 1635, and 1636, three Commissions were appointed and special instructions against enclosure were issued to the Justices of Assize. In parts of the country, at any rate, land which had been laid down to grass was plowed up in obedience to the Government’s orders. In the four years from 1635 to 1638 a list of some 600 offenders was returned to the Council, and about £50,000 was imposed upon them in fines.[68] With this policy Laud was whole-heartedly in sympathy. A letter in his private correspondence, in which he expresses his detestation of enclosure, reveals the temper which evoked Clarendon’s gentle complaint that the archbishop made himself unpopular by his inclination “a little too much to countenance the Commission for Depopulation.”[69] Laud was himself an active member of the Commission, and dismissed with impatient contempt the squirearchy’s appeal to the common law. In the day of his ruin he was reminded by his enemies of the needlessly sharp censures with which he barbed the fine imposed upon an enclosing landlord.[70]
The prevention of enclosure and depopulation was merely one element in a general policy, by which a benevolent Government, unhampered by what Laud had called “that noise” of parliamentary debate, was to endeavor by even-handed pressure to enforce social obligations on great and small, and to prevent the public interest being sacrificed to an unconscionable appetite for private gain. The preoccupation of the Council with the problem of securing adequate food supplies and reasonable prices, with poor relief, and, to a lesser degree, with questions of wages, has been described by Miss Leonard, and its attempts to protect craftsmen against exploitation at the hands of merchants by Professor Unwin.[71] In 1630-1 it issued in an amended form the Elizabethan Book of Orders, instructing justices as to their duty to see that markets were served and prices controlled, appointed a special committee of the Privy Council as Commissioners of the Poor and later a separate Commission, and issued a Book of Orders for the better administration of the Poor Law. In 1629, 1631, and again in 1637, it took steps to secure that the wages of textile workers in East Anglia were raised, and punished with imprisonment in the Fleet an employer notorious for paying in truck. As President of the Council of the North, Wentworth protected the commoners whose vested interests were threatened by the drainage of Hatfield Chase, and endeavored to insist on the stricter administration of the code regulating the woollen industry.[72]
Such action, even if inspired largely by the obvious interest of the Government, which had enemies enough on its hands already, in preventing popular discontent, was of a kind to appeal to one with Laud’s indifference to the opinion of the wealthier classes, and with Laud’s belief in the divine mission of the House of David to teach an obedient people “to lay down the private for the public sake.” It is not surprising, therefore, when the Star Chamber fines an engrosser of corn, to find him improving the occasion with the remark that the defendant has been “guilty of a most foule offence, which the Prophet hath [called] in a very energeticall phrase grynding the faces of the poore,” and that the dearth has been caused, not by God, but by “cruell men”;[73] or taking part in the proceedings of the Privy Council at a time when it is pressing justices, apparently not without success, to compel the East Anglian clothiers to raise the wages of spinners and weavers; or serving on the Lincolnshire sub-committee of the Commission on the Relief of the Poor, which was appointed in January 1631.[74]
“A bishop,” observed Laud, in answer to the attack of Lord Saye and Sele, “may preach the Gospel more publicly and to far greater edification in a court of judicature, or at a Council-table, where great men are met together to draw things to an issue, than many preachers in their several charges can.”[75] The Church, which had abandoned the pretension itself to control society, found some compensation in the reflection that its doctrines were not wholly without influence in impressing the principles which were applied by the State. The history of the rise of individual liberty—to use a question-begging phrase—in economic affairs follows somewhat the same course as does its growth in the more important sphere of religion, and is not unconnected with it. The conception of religion as a thing private and individual does not emerge until after a century in which religious freedom normally means the freedom of the State to prescribe religion, not the freedom of the individual to worship God as he pleases. The assertion of economic liberty as a natural right comes at the close of a period in which, while a religious phraseology was retained and a religious interpretation of social institutions was often sincerely held, the supernatural sanction had been increasingly merged in doctrines based on reasons of state and public expediency. “Jerusalem ... stands not for the City and the State only ... nor for the Temple and the Church only, but jointly for both.”[76] In identifying the maintenance of public morality with the spasmodic activities of an incompetent Government, the Church had built its house upon the sand. It did not require prophetic gifts to foresee that the fall of the City would be followed by the destruction of the Temple.
Though the assertion of the traditional economic ethics continued to be made by one school of churchmen down to the meeting of the Long Parliament, it was increasingly the voice of the past appealing to an alien generation. The expression of a theory of society which had made religion supreme over all secular affairs, it had outlived the synthesis in which it had been an element, and survived, an archaic fragment, into an age to whose increasing individualism the idea of corporate morality was as objectionable as that of ecclesiastical discipline by bishops and archdeacons was becoming to its religion. The collision between the prevalent practice, and what still purported to be the teaching of the Church, is almost the commonest theme of the economic literature of the period from 1550 to 1640; of much of it, indeed, it is the occasion. Whatever the Church might say, men had asked interest for loans, and charged what prices the market would stand, at the very zenith of the Age of Faith. But then, except in the great commercial centers and in the high finance of the Papacy and of secular Governments, their transactions had been petty and individual, an occasional shift to meet an emergency or seize an opportunity. The new thing in the England of the sixteenth century was that devices that had formerly been occasional were now woven into the very texture of the industrial and commercial civilization which was developing in the later years of Elizabeth, and whose subsequent enormous expansion was to give English society its characteristic quality and tone. Fifty years later, Harrington, in a famous passage, described how the ruin of the feudal nobility by the Tudors, by democratizing the ownership of land, had prepared the way for the bourgeois republic.[77] His hint of the economic changes which preceded the Civil War might be given a wider application. The age of Elizabeth saw a steady growth of capitalism in textiles and mining, a great increase of foreign trade and an outburst of joint-stock enterprise in connection with it, the beginnings of something like deposit banking in the hands of the scriveners, and the growth, aided by the fall of Antwerp and the Government’s own financial necessities, of a money-market with an almost modern technique—speculation, futures and arbitrage transactions—in London. The future lay with the classes who sprang to wealth and influence with the expansion of commerce in the later years of the century, and whose religious and political aspirations were, two generations later, to overthrow the monarchy.
An organized money-market has many advantages. But it is not a school of social ethics or of political responsibility. Finance, being essentially impersonal, a matter of opportunities, security and risks, acted among other causes as a solvent of the sentiment, fostered both by the teaching of the Church and the decencies of social intercourse among neighbors, which regarded keen bargaining as “sharp practice.” In the half-century which followed the Reformation, thanks to the collapse of sterling on the international market, as a result of a depreciated currency, war, and a foreign debt contracted on ruinous terms, the state of the foreign exchanges was the obsession of publicists and politicians. Problems of currency and credit lend themselves more readily than most economic questions to discussion in terms of mechanical causation. It was in the long debate provoked by the rise in prices and the condition of the exchanges, that the psychological assumptions, which were afterwards to be treated by economists as of self-evident and universal validity, were first hammered out.
“We see,” wrote Malynes, “how one thing driveth or enforceth another, like as in a clock where there are many wheels, the first wheel being stirred driveth the next and that the third and so forth, till the last that moveth the instrument that striketh the clock; or like as in a press going in a strait, where the foremost is driven by him that is next to him, and the next by him that followeth him.”[78] The spirit of modern business could hardly be more aptly described. Conservative writers denounced it as fostering a soulless individualism, but, needless to say, their denunciations were as futile as they were justified. It might be possible to put fear into the heart of the village dealer who bought cheap and sold dear, or of the pawnbroker who took a hundred quarters of wheat when he had lent ninety, with the warning that “the devices of men cannot be concealed from Almighty God.” To a great clothier, or to a capitalist like Pallavicino, Spinola, or Thomas Gresham, who managed the Government business in Antwerp, such sentiments were foolishness, and usurious interest appeared, not bad morals, but bad business. Moving, as they did, in a world where loans were made, not to meet the temporary difficulty of an unfortunate neighbor, but as a profitable investment on the part of not too scrupulous business men, who looked after themselves and expected others to do the same, they had scanty sympathy with doctrines which reflected the spirit of mutual aid not unnatural in the small circle of neighbors who formed the ordinary village or borough in rural England.
It was a natural result of their experience that, without the formal enunciation of any theory of economic individualism, they should throw their weight against the traditional restrictions, resent the attempts made by preachers and popular movements to apply doctrines of charity and “good conscience” to the impersonal mechanism of large-scale transactions, and seek to bring public policy more into accordance with their economic practice. The opposition to the Statutes against depopulation offered by the self-interest of the gentry was being supported in the latter years of Elizabeth by free-trade arguments in the House of Commons, and the last Act, which was passed in 1597, expressly allowed land to be laid down to pasture for the purpose of giving it a rest.[79] From at any rate the middle of the century, the fixing of prices by municipal authorities and by the Government was regarded with skepticism by the more advanced economic theorists, and towards the end of the century it produced complaints that, since it weakened the farmer’s incentive to grow corn, its results were the precise opposite of those intended.[80] As markets widened, the control of the middleman who dealt in wool and grain, though strictly enforced in theory, showed unmistakable signs of breaking down in practice. Gresham attacked the prohibition of usury, and normally stipulated that financiers who subscribed on his inducement to public loans should be indemnified against legal proceedings.[81] Nor could he well have done otherwise, for the sentiment of the City was that of the merchant in Wilson’s Dialogue: “What man is so madde to deliver his moneye out of his owne possession for naughte? or whoe is he that will not make of his owne the best he can?”[82] With such a wind of doctrine in their sails men were not far from the days of complete freedom of contract.
Most significant of all, economic interests were already appealing to the political theory which, when finally systematized by Locke, was to prove that the State which interferes with property and business destroys its own title to exist. “All free subjects,” declared a Committee of the House of Commons in 1604, “are born inheritable, as to their land, so also to the free exercise of their industry, in those trades whereto they apply themselves and whereby they are to live. Merchandise being the chief and richest of all other, and of greater extent and importance than all the rest, it is against the natural right and liberty of the subjects of England to restrain it into the hands of some few.”[83] The process by which natural justice, imperfectly embodied in positive law, was replaced as the source of authority by positive law which might or might not be the expression of natural justice, had its analogy in the rejection by social theory of the whole conception of an objective standard of economic equity. The law of nature had been invoked by medieval writers as a moral restraint upon economic self-interest. By the seventeenth century, a significant revolution had taken place. “Nature” had come to connote, not divine ordinance, but human appetites, and natural rights were invoked by the individualism of the age as a reason why self-interest should be given free play.
The effect of these practical exigencies and intellectual changes was seen in a reversal of policy on the part of the State. In 1571 the Act of 1552, which had prohibited all interest as “a vyce moste odyous and detestable, as in dyvers places of the hollie Scripture it is evydent to be seen,” had been repealed, after a debate in the House which revealed the revolt of the plain man against the theorists who had triumphed twenty years before, and his determination that the law should not impose on business a utopian morality.[84] The exaction of interest ceased to be a criminal offence, provided that the rate did not exceed ten per cent., though it still remained open to a debtor, in the improbable event of his thinking it expedient to jeopardize his chance of future advances, to take civil proceedings to recover any payment made in excess of the principal. This qualified condonation of usury on the part of the State naturally reacted upon religious opinion. The Crown was supreme ruler of the Church of Christ, and it was not easy for a loyal Church to be more fastidious than its head. Moderate interest, if without legal protection, was at any rate not unlawful, and it is difficult to damn with conviction vices of which the degrees have been adjusted on a sliding scale by an Act of Parliament. Objective economic science was beginning its disillusioning career, in the form of discussions on the rise in prices, the mechanism of the money-market, and the balance of trade, by publicists concerned, not to point a moral, but to analyze forces so productive of profit to those interested in their operation. Since Calvin’s indulgence to interest, critics of the traditional doctrine could argue that religion itself spoke with an uncertain voice.
Such developments inevitably affected the tone in which the discussion of economic ethics was carried on by the divines, and even before the end of the sixteenth century, though they did not dream of abandoning the denunciation of unconscionable bargains, they were surrounding it with qualifications. The Decades of Bullinger, of which three English translations were made in the ten years following his death, and which Convocation in 1586 required to be obtained and studied by all the inferior clergy, indicated a via media. As uncompromising as any medieval writer in his hatred of the sin of covetousness, he denounces with all the old fervor oppressive contracts which grind the poor. But he is less intolerant of economic motives than most of his predecessors, and concedes, with Calvin, that, before interest is condemned as usury, it is necessary to consider both the terms of the loan and the position of borrower and lender.
The stricter school of religious opinion continued to cling to the traditional theory down to the Civil War. Conservative divines took advantage of the section in the Act of 1571 declaring that “all usurie being forbydden by the lawe of God is synne and detestable,” to argue that the Statute had in reality altered nothing, and that the State left it to the Church to prevent bargains which, for reasons of practical expediency, it did not think fit to prohibit, but which it did not encourage and declined to enforce. It is in obedience to such doctrines that a scrupulous parson refuses a cure until he is assured that the money which will be paid to him comes from the rent of land, not from interest on capital.[85] But, even so, there are difficulties. The parson of Kingham bequeaths a cow to the poor of Burford, which is “set to hire for a year or two for four shillings a year,” the money being used for their assistance. But the arrangement has its inconveniences. Cows are mortal, and this communal cow is “very like to have perished through casualty and ill-keeping.”[86] Will not the poor be surer of their money if the cow is disposed of for cash down? So it is sold to the man who previously hired it, and the interest spent on the poor instead. Is this usury? Is it usury to invest money in business in order to provide an income for those, like widows and orphans, who cannot trade with it themselves? If it is lawful to buy a rent-charge or to share in trading profits, what is the particular criminality of charging a price for a loan? Why should a creditor, who may himself be poor, make a loan gratis, in order to put money into the pocket of a wealthy capitalist, who uses the advance to corner the wool crop or to speculate on the exchanges?
To such questions liberal theologians answered that the crucial point was not the letter of the law which forbad the breeding of barren metal, but the observance of Christian charity in economic, as in other, transactions. Their opponents appealed to the text of Scripture and the law of the Church, argued that usury differed, not merely in degree, but in kind, from payments which, like rent and profits, were morally unobjectionable provided that they were not extortionate in amount, and insisted that usury was to be interpreted as “whatever is taken for a loan above the principal.” The literature of the subject was voluminous. But it was obsolete almost before it was produced. For, whether theologians and moralists condemned all interest, or only some interest, as contrary to Christian ethics, the assumption implied in their very disagreement had been that economic relations belonged to a province of which, in the last resort, the Church was master. That economic transactions were one department of ethical conduct, and to be judged, like other parts of it, by spiritual criteria; that, whatever concessions the State might see fit to make to human frailty, a certain standard of economic morality was involved in membership of the Christian Church; that it was the function of ecclesiastical authorities, whoever they might be, to take the action needed to bring home to men their social obligations—such doctrines were still common ground to all sections of religious thought. It was precisely this whole conception of a social theory based ultimately on religion which was being discredited. While rival authorities were discussing the correct interpretation of economic ethics, the flank of both was turned by the growth of a powerful body of lay opinion, which argued that economics were one thing and ethics another.
Usury, a summary name for all kinds of extortion, was the issue in which the whole controversy over “good conscience” in bargaining came to a head, and such questions were only one illustration of the immense problems with which the rise of a commercial civilization confronted a Church whose social ethics still professed to be those of the Bible, the Fathers and the Schoolmen. A score of books, garnished with citations from Scripture and from the canonists, were written to answer them. Many of them are learned; some are almost readable. But it may be doubted whether, even in their own day, they satisfied any one but their authors. The truth is that, in spite of the sincerity with which it was held that the transactions of business must somehow be amenable to the moral law, the code of practical ethics, in which that claim was expressed, had been forged to meet the conditions of a very different environment from that of commercial England in the seventeenth century.
The most crucial and the most difficult of all political questions is that which turns on the difference between public and private morality. The problem which it presents in the relations between States is a commonplace. But, since its essence is the difficulty of applying the same moral standard to decisions which affect large masses of men as to those in which only individuals are involved, it emerges in a hardly less acute form in the sphere of economic life, as soon as its connections ramify widely, and the unit is no longer the solitary producer, but a group. To argue, in the manner of Machiavelli, that there is one rule for business and another for private life, is to open a door to an orgy of unscrupulousness before which the mind recoils. To argue that there is no difference at all is to lay down a principle which few men who have faced the difficulty in practice will be prepared to endorse as of invariable application, and incidentally to expose the idea of morality itself to discredit by subjecting it to an almost intolerable strain. The practical result of sentimentality is too often a violent reaction towards the baser kinds of Realpolitik.
With the expansion of finance and international trade in the sixteenth century, it was this problem which faced the Church. Granted that I should love my neighbor as myself, the questions which, under modern conditions of large-scale organization, remain for solution are, Who precisely is my neighbor? and, How exactly am I to make my love for him effective in practice? To these questions the conventional religious teaching supplied no answer, for it had not even realized that they could be put. It had tried to moralize economic relations by treating every transaction as a case of personal conduct, involving personal responsibility. In an age of impersonal finance, world-markets and a capitalist organization of industry, its traditional social doctrines had no specific to offer, and were merely repeated, when, in order to be effective, they should have been thought out again from the beginning and formulated in new and living terms. It had endeavored to protect the peasant and the craftsman against the oppression of the money-lender and the monopolist. Faced with the problems of a wage-earning proletariat, it could do no more than repeat, with meaningless iteration, its traditional lore as to the duties of master to servant and servant to master. It had insisted that all men were brethren. But it did not occur to it to point out that, as a result of the new economic imperialism which was beginning to develop in the seventeenth century, the brethren of the English merchant were the Africans whom he kidnaped for slavery in America, or the American Indians whom he stripped of their lands, or the Indian craftsmen from whom he bought muslins and silks at starvation prices. Religion had not yet learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral principles by clasping the comfortable formula that for the transactions of economic life no moral principles exist. But, for the problems involved in the association of men for economic purposes on the grand scale which was to be increasingly the rule in the future, the social doctrines advanced from the pulpit offered, in their traditional form, little guidance. Their practical ineffectiveness prepared the way for their theoretical abandonment.
They were abandoned because, on the whole, they deserved to be abandoned. The social teaching of the Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself had ceased to think. Energy in economic action, realist intelligence in economic thought—these qualities were to be the note of the seventeenth century, when once the confusion of the Civil War had died down. When mankind is faced with the choice between exhilarating activities and piety imprisoned in a shriveled mass of desiccated formulæ, it will choose the former, though the energy be brutal and the intelligence narrow. In the age of Bacon and Descartes, bursting with clamorous interests and eager ideas, fruitful, above all, in the germs of economic speculation, from which was to grow the new science of Political Arithmetic, the social theory of the Church of England turned its face from the practical world, to pore over doctrines which, had their original authors been as impervious to realities as their later exponents, would never have been formulated. Naturally it was shouldered aside. It was neglected because it had become negligible.
The defect was fundamental. It made itself felt in countries where there was no Reformation, no Puritan movement, no common law jealous of its rights and eager to prune ecclesiastical pretensions. But in England there were all three, and, from the beginning of the last quarter of the sixteenth century, ecclesiastical authorities who attempted to enforce traditional morality had to reckon with a temper which denied their right to exercise any jurisdiction at all, above all, any jurisdiction interfering with economic matters. It was not merely that there was the familiar objection of the plain man that parsons know nothing of business—that “it is not in simple divines to show what contract is lawful and what is not.”[87] More important, there was the opposition of the common lawyers to part, at least, of the machinery of ecclesiastical discipline. Bancroft in 1605 complained to the Privy Council that the judges were endeavoring to confine the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical courts to testamentary and matrimonial cases, and alleged that, of more than five hundred prohibitions issued to stop proceedings in the Court of Arches since the accession of Elizabeth, not more than one in twenty could be sustained.[88] “As things are,” wrote two years later the author of a treatise on the civil and ecclesiastical law, “neither jurisdiction knowes their owne bounds, but one snatcheth from the other, in maner as in a batable ground lying betweene two kingdomes.”[89] The jurisdiction of the Court of High Commission suffered in the same way. In the last resort appeals from the ecclesiastical courts went either to it or to the Court of Delegates. From the latter part of the sixteenth century down to the removal of Coke from the Bench in 1616, the judges were from time to time staying proceedings before the Court of High Commission by prohibitions, or discharging offenders imprisoned by it. In 1577, for example, they released on a writ of Habeas Corpus a prisoner committed by the High Commission on a charge of usury.[90]
Most fundamental of all, there was the growth of a theory of the Church, which denied the very principle of a discipline exercised by bishops and archdeacons. The acquiescence of the laity in the moral jurisdiction of the clergy had been accorded with less and less readiness for two centuries before the Reformation. With the growth under Elizabeth of a vigorous Puritan movement, which had its stronghold among the trading and commercial classes, that jurisdiction became to a considerable proportion of the population little less than abhorrent. Their dislike of it was based, of course, on weightier grounds than its occasional interference in matters of business. But their attitude had as an inevitable result that, with the disparagement of the whole principle of the traditional ecclesiastical discipline, that particular use of it was also discredited. It was not that Puritanism implied a greater laxity in social relations. On the contrary, in its earlier phases it stood, at least in theory, for a stricter discipline of the life of the individual, alike in his business and in his pleasures. But it repudiated as anti-Christian the organs through which such discipline had in fact been exercised. When the Usury Bill of 1571 was being discussed in the House of Commons, reference to the canon law was met by the protest that the rules of the canon law on the matter were abolished, and that “they should be no more remembered than they are followed.”[91] Feeling against the system rose steadily during the next two generations; excommunications, when courts ventured to resort to them, were freely disregarded;[92] and by the thirties of the seventeenth century, under the influence of Laud’s régime, the murmur was threatening to become a hurricane. Then came the Long Parliament, the fierce denunciations in both Houses of the interference of the clergy in civil affairs, and the legislation abolishing the Court of High Commission, depriving the ordinary ecclesiastical courts of penal jurisdiction, and finally, with the abolition of episcopacy, sweeping them away altogether.
“Not many good days,” wrote Penn, “since ministers meddled so much in laymen’s business.”[93] That sentiment was a dogma on which, after the Restoration, both Cavalier and Roundhead could agree. It inevitably reacted, not only upon the practical powers of the clergy, which in any case had long been feeble, but on the whole conception of religion which regarded it as involving the control of economic self-interest by what Laud had called “the body of the Church.” The works of Sanderson and of Jeremy Taylor, continuing an earlier tradition, reasserted with force and eloquence the view that the Christian is bound by his faith to a rule of life which finds expression in equity in bargaining and in works of mercy to his neighbors.[94] But the conception that the Church possessed, of its own authority, an independent standard of social values, which it could apply as a criterion to the practical affairs of the economic world, grew steadily weaker. The result, neither immediate nor intended, but inevitable, was the tacit denial of spiritual significance in the transactions of business and in the relations of organized society. Repudiating the right of religion to advance any social theory distinctively its own, that attitude became itself the most tyrannical and paralyzing of theories. It may be called Indifferentism.
The change had begun before the Civil War. It was completed with the Restoration, and, still more, with the Revolution. In the eighteenth century it is almost superfluous to examine the teaching of the Church of England as to social ethics. For it brings no distinctive contribution, and, except by a few eccentrics, the very conception of the Church as an independent moral authority, whose standards may be in sharp antithesis to social conventions, has been abandoned.
An institution which possesses no philosophy of its own inevitably accepts that which happens to be fashionable. What set the tone of social thought in the eighteenth century was partly the new Political Arithmetic, which had come to maturity at the Restoration, and which, as was to be expected in the first great age of English natural science—the age of Newton, of Halley, and of the Royal Society—drew its inspiration, not from religion or morals, but from mathematics and physics. It was still more the political theory associated with the name of Locke, but popularized and debased by a hundred imitators. Society is not a community of classes with varying functions, united to each other by mutual obligations arising from their relation to a common end. It is a joint-stock company rather than an organism, and the liabilities of the shareholders are strictly limited. They enter it in order to insure the rights already vested in them by the immutable laws of nature. The State, a matter of convenience, not of supernatural sanctions, exists for the protection of those rights, and fulfills its object in so far as, by maintaining contractual freedom, it secures full scope for their unfettered exercise.
The most important of such rights are property rights, and property rights attach mainly, though not, of course, exclusively, to the higher orders of men, who hold the tangible, material “stock” of society. Those who do not subscribe to the company have no legal claim to a share in the profits, though they have a moral claim on the charity of their superiors. Hence the curious phraseology which treats almost all below the nobility, gentry and freeholders as “the poor”—and the poor, it is well known, are of two kinds, “the industrious poor,” who work for their betters, and “the idle poor,” who work for themselves. Hence the unending discussions as to whether “the laboring poor” are to be classed among the “productive” or “unproductive” classes—whether they are, or are not, really worth their keep. Hence the indignant repudiation of the suggestion that any substantial amelioration of their lot could be effected by any kind of public policy. “It would be easier, where property was well secured, to live without money than without poor, ... who, as they ought to be kept from starving, so they should receive nothing worth saving”; the poor “have nothing to stir them up to be serviceable but their wants, which it is prudence to relieve, but folly to cure”; “to make society happy, it is necessary that great numbers should be wretched as well as poor.”[95] Such sentences from a work printed in 1714 are not typical. But they are straws which show how the wind is blowing.
In such an atmosphere temperatures were naturally low and equable, and enthusiasm, if not a lapse in morals, was an intellectual solecism and an error in taste. Religious thought was not immune from the same influence. It was not merely that the Church, which, as much as the State, was the heir of the Revolution settlement, reproduced the temper of an aristocratic society, as it reproduced its class organization and economic inequalities, and was disposed too often to idealize as a virtue that habit of mean subservience to wealth and social position, which, after more than half a century of political democracy, is still the characteristic and odious vice of Englishmen. Not less significant was the fact that, apart from certain groups and certain questions, it accepted the prevalent social philosophy and adapted its teaching to it. The age in which political theory was cast in the mould of religion had yielded to one in which religious thought was no longer an imperious master, but a docile pupil. Conspicuous exceptions like Law, who reasserted with matchless power the idea that Christianity implies a distinctive way of life, or protests like Wesley’s sermon on The Use of Money, merely heighten the impression of a general acquiescence in the conventional ethics. The prevalent religious thought might not unfairly be described as morality tempered by prudence, and softened on occasion by a rather sentimental compassion for inferiors. It was the natural counterpart of a social philosophy which repudiated teleology, and which substituted the analogy of a self-regulating mechanism, moved by the weights and pulleys of economic motives, for the theory which had regarded society as an organism composed of different classes united by their common subordination to a spiritual purpose.
Such an attitude, with its emphasis on the economic harmony of apparently conflicting interests, left small scope for moral casuistry. The materials for the reformer were, indeed, abundant enough. The phenomena of early commercial capitalism—consider only the orgy of financial immorality which culminated in 1720—were of a kind which might have been expected to shock even the not over-sensitive conscience of the eighteenth century. Two centuries before, the Fuggers had been denounced by preachers and theologians; and, compared with the men who engineered the South Sea Bubble, the Fuggers had been innocents. In reality, religious opinion was quite unmoved by the spectacle. The traditional scheme of social ethics had been worked out in a simpler age; in the commercial England of banking, and shipping, and joint-stock enterprise, it seemed, and was called, a Gothic superstition. From the Restoration onward it was quietly dropped. The usurer and engrosser disappear from episcopal charges. In the popular manual called The Whole Duty of Man,[96] first published in 1658, and widely read during the following century, extortion and oppression still figure as sins, but the attempt to define what they are is frankly abandoned. If preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words, “trade is one thing and religion is another,” they imply a not very different conclusion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions between them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of a providential plan. “National commerce, good morals and good government,” wrote Dean Tucker, of whom Warburton unkindly said that religion was his trade, and trade his religion, “are but part of one general scheme, in the designs of Providence.”
Naturally, on such a view, it was unnecessary for the Church to insist on commercial morality, since sound morality coincided with commercial wisdom. The existing order, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of Governments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the order established by nature was the order established by God. Most educated men, in the middle of the century, would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of Pope: