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The era of the economist had not yet dawned, but social conditions were preparing for him. In the Middle Ages English industry and trade had been largely regulated by religious discipline. The sixteenth century saw the breakdown of all the old relationships; mediæval rural society collapsed with the weakening of feudal ties and the secularizing of church lands; the gilds lost their power, and the private capitalist emerged; commerce organized itself on an international basis; landowners regarded their estates not as a nursery of men-at-arms but as a source of financial profit. The old church had frowned upon usury, and therefore upon capitalism, but that tabu was beginning to fade out of the intellectual air. Luther, indeed—at heart a monk and a peasant—had small sympathy with this consequence of the Reformation,^[4] but Calvin, the middle-class lawyer, provided, perhaps unwittingly, its theoretic justification. Calvinism began in the towns, its protagonists were craftsmen, attorneys, and traders, its creed was largely built upon Roman law and the Jewish Old Testament. It made commercial practice respectable by making the virtues which led to success in it virtues acceptable to God—thrift, austerity, an adamantine discipline. It made the middle classes a self-conscious and self-confident order, revolutionaries as against the elder society, but stout upholders of their new-won privileges. “The bourgeoisie,” Karl Marx has written, “whenever it got the upper hand, put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations, pitilessly tore asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and left remaining no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest and callous cash payment.”^[5]

The seventeenth century opened in economic disequilibrium. Currency problems had been acute during Elizabeth’s reign, due partly to the depreciation of the lighter and smaller coinage and partly to the vast influx of precious metals into Europe from the Spanish colonies. When Charles I came to the throne rents and prices were calculated to have risen during the previous century by between three and four hundred per cent. This meant a fall in real wages and much suffering for the poor, a problem with which the new poor law was intended to cope; it meant, too, an increasing stringency in the finances of the Crown, with fateful results in the near future. But high prices brought prosperity to many classes; the capitalists, great and small, the nobles with their square TUDOR POLICY miles of territory, the yeoman and the tenant-farmer who got a better return for their labours, and, being self-supporting, did not feel the increase in the cost of their modest purchases. An age of social dislocation is usually an age of social speculation, and at first there had been many who dreamed of a Reformation which would not only purge the church but recast society. Bucer, the tutor of Edward VI, had advocated a kind of Christian socialism under which prices should be fixed and profits limited, and the State should supervise the methods of industry and agriculture;^[6] while Latimer with his fiery eloquence had taught the social responsibilities of wealth and the title of the poor man to the rich man’s surplus.^[7] But by the second decade of the seventeenth century such dreams had vanished from high places, and had gone underground to be brooded over by the humble. The antithesis that remained was between the paternalism which the Stuarts had inherited from the Tudors, and the self-confident individualism of the new age. A remnant of the mediæval economy, with the Crown behind it, was arrayed against the rudimentary first economics of the modern world.

The Tudors had had no doubts about their course. Their business was to make the central government all-powerful, and economic individualism seemed to them as much a peril as the jurisdictions and privileges of turbulent nobles. They were determined upon securing a united people, with separate functions allotted to each class, and a watchful paternal government over all. They attempted to regulate wages and prices and rates of interest, to curb the oppressive landlord and trader, to ordain methods in industry, commerce and farming. By the grant of patents and monopolies they desired to give the Crown as representing the nation a direct interest in private enterprise.^[8] The spirit was the spirit of Laud—on his better side; its philosophy was eloquently laid down by Hooker; perverted as was its practice, there was greatness in a creed which held that the State was no mere arrangement to meet the convenience of the citizens, but an organic and mystic brotherhood, the temporal pattern of the kingdom of God. On this point at any rate the extremists of royalism and of revolution were at one.

But such a faith was out of tune with an age of which individualism had become the keynote. The disintegration had gone too far for much of the old cement to hold. Already in the first years of the century a different gospel was being preached. “All free subjects 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 others, 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.”^[9] Here were new notions and fateful words—“natural right,” “liberty of the subject.” The ordinary man was beginning to deny to the State any title to interfere with his way of earning his bread and butter. What had begun under the Tudors with a dislike of the meddling of ecclesiastical courts in lay matters was fast becoming a repugnance to all State interference with private business. Laissez-faire, the thing if not the phrase, had come into England.

This intolerance of restraint in one particular sphere drew strength from the religious faith of an important section of the people. The presbyterian, who would have coerced the whole nation into agreement with his views on the next world, would permit no man to dictate to him on the affairs of this one. It is right to emphasize the link in puritanism between business and godliness, for it was to mean much in the coming strife. The typical puritan was the small master, who owned his land or his tools, and who to keep his footing had to spend laborious days. His religion taught him to detest the vices of idleness and extravagance and to shun common pleasures, and the same abnegation was forced on him by his worldly interests. A rigid self-discipline was the BUSINESS AND GODLINESS necessity as well as the ideal of his life. “All that crossed the views of the needy courtiers, the proud encroaching priests, the thievish projectors, the lewd nobility and gentry—whoever was jealous for God’s glory and worship, could not endure blasphemous oaths, ribald conversation, profane scoffs, Sabbath breaking, derision of the word of God, or the like—whoever could endure a serious, modest habit or conversation, or anything good—all these were Puritans.”^[10] Such a catalogue had an economic as well as a spiritual significance. The way of salvation was also, in most cases, the way of prosperity, for the meek would inherit the earth, as well as the kingdom of Heaven. The love of money, not money itself, was the root of all evil; it was deadly sin to forget the interests of the soul in the task of getting wealth, but if these were assured other things would be added unto them. “Be wholly taken up in diligent business of your lawful callings,” Richard Baxter enjoined, “when you are not exercised in the immediate service of God.”^[11] “Godliness,” said another preacher, “hath the promises of this life as well as of the life to come.”^[12]

From this it was a short step to seeing material success as in some degree a proof of spiritual health, since the two sprang from cognate disciplines. The poor were no longer “God’s poor,” and poverty so far from being the state suited to a Christian was more likely to be the consequence of sin. The intense individualism of the puritan and his sense of a direct responsibility to his Maker weakened inevitably his sense of social responsibility. The way to the Celestial City lay through Vanity Fair—“he that will go to the City, and not go through this town, must needs go out of the world”; but the pilgrim, while fleeing the vanities, might reasonably do a little lawful merchantry. Bunyan, a saint and a peasant, has an eye only on spiritual values, but the general temper of puritanism was less hostile to Mr Save-all than to Mr Linger-after-lust, and many notable professors had been to school with Mr Gripe-man “in Love Gain, which is a market town in the county of Coveting, in the north.”

The English economy was moving therefore away from the ordered mediæval society towards a system where capital demanded a looser rein, an atomic society impatient of the old restraints, laying the emphasis on personal rights and individual duties. Upon this, confusing the issues and blurring the distinctions, fell the blast of theory from the laboratories of many thinkers. We must consider in greater detail the intellectual background.