II. The Collapse of Mercantilist Doctrine

The Self-regulating Mechanism of Specie Distribution.—After Hume and Smith had written, mercantilism was definitely on the defensive and was wholly or largely rejected by the leading English economists. That their victory was as great as it was, was due largely, of course, to the force of their reasoning and the brilliance of their exposition, but it was due also in large part to the fact that, even before they wrote, mercantilism as a body of economic doctrine had already been disintegrating because of dissension within the ranks of its adherents and attacks by earlier critics. An important element in its collapse, especially in its monetary phases, was the development of the theory of the self-regulating mechanism of international specie distribution. The most influential formulation of this theory in England prior to the nineteenth century was by Hume. But its most important constituent elements had been stated long before Hume, and several earlier writers had brought them together much as he did.

Stated briefly, the theory is that a country with a metallic currency will automatically get the amount of bullion it needs to maintain its prices at such a level relative to the prices prevailing abroad as to maintain an even balance between its exports and imports. Should more money than this happen to come into that country, its prices would rise relatively to those of other countries; its exports, consequently, would fall, and its imports increase; the resultant adverse balance of payments would have to be met in specie; and the excess of money would thus be drained off. If, on the other hand, a country's monetary supply should happen to fall below the amount necessary to maintain equilibrium, its prices would fall relative to those abroad, exports would rise and imports fall, and the resultant favorable balance of payments would bring in an amount of specie from abroad sufficient to restore equilibrium. For its formulation and its use as a basis for repudiation of certain of the monetary phases of mercantilist doctrine, five stages had to be achieved:

The first proposition was an important element in the mercantilist doctrine, and was universally accepted. A quantity theory of the value of money, as has already been shown, was held by many of the mercantilists, and there were few who rejected it once they became aware of it. There remains to be examined only the progress made toward attainment of the last three stages. Vague statements suggestive of the existence of a self-regulating mechanism of specie distribution but not specific as to its character will be disregarded.

Recognition that low prices were conducive to large exports and high prices to large imports was fairly common even, in the early mercantilist literature, but I have not been able to find any generalized statement setting forth the dependence of the trade balance on the comparative level of prices until the end of the seventeenth century. Malynes at one point approached surprisingly close to a grasp of the self-regulating mechanism, especially if one considers his general obtuseness and obscurantism. He argues that if the manipulations of exchange dealers forced English currency below its mint par, coin would be exported, home prices would consequently fall, and foreign commodities would rise in price because of the increase of money abroad. Had he proceeded to consider the effect of these price changes on the balance of trade and on the flow of specie, he would have presented a complete formulation of a full cycle of the self-regulating mechanism. He proceeded, instead, to denunciation of the exchangers. Except for the development of the quantity theory of money, I can find no real traces of further progress in this connection until the last decade of the seventeenth century.

Locke is sometimes credited, wrongly I believe, with having come close to a satisfactory statement of the self-regulating mechanism, although he did make some advance in that direction. He states that a country in commercial relations with, and using the same metal for currency as, the rest of the world requires under given circumstances a certain (presumably minimum) amount of money if a certain volume of trade is to be carried on at all, or is to be carried on without loss:

That in a country, that hath open commerce with the rest of the world, and uses money, made of the same materials with their neighbors, any quantity of that money will not serve to drive any quantity of trade; but there must be a certain proportion between their money and trade. The reason whereof is this, because to keep your trade going without loss, your commodities amongst you must keep an equal, or at least near the price of the same species of commodities in the neighboring countries; which they cannot do, if your money be far less than in other countries; for then either your commodities must be sold very cheap, or a great part of your trade must stand still, there not being money enough in the country to pay for them (in their shifting of hands) at that high price, which the plenty, and consequently low value of money, makes them at in another country. ...

He proceeds to illustrate by imagining that England loses half its money, other things there and elsewhere remaining unaltered. Either half the trade, employment, etc., would cease, or prices, wages, rents would be cut in half. If the latter should result, domestic commodities would be sold abroad cheap and foreign commodities would be bought dear, to the loss of the country, and labor might emigrate to where wages were high. Eventually, because of the relatively high foreign prices, foreign goods would become scarce (i.e., imports would fall?). He says nothing as to the necessary as distinguished from the possible and the desirable relations between prices at home and abroad, and he gives not even a hint that the departure from the initial and desirable situation will breed its own correctives, through its influence on price levels, commodity balances, and specie flows. All that Locke had of the elements of the self-regulating mechanism was the quantity theory of money, with even here the defect that at the critical point he failed to make use of it and implied instead that a serious maladjustment between prices and the quantity of money was as likely to be corrected, presumably permanently, by a consequent change in the volume of trade as by a change in prices.

In dealing with the factors determining the exchange rates, Locke was much more penetrating. He explains the exchange rate between two countries as due to: (1) “the overbalance of the trade,” which, the context shows, means the balance of payments resulting from past transactions; and (2) the relative plenty of money (identified with liquid capital) which affects inversely the opportunities for profitable investment of surplus funds, and therefore determines to what country they will flow. He states fairly clearly the limits beyond which exchange rates cannot move without leading to specie flows.

North, in 1691, presented a concise formulation of an automatic and self-regulating mechanism, which provides a country with the “determinate sum of specific money” required for carrying on the trade of the nation. It is not, however, the mechanism described in the modern theory, and is not, explicitly at least, an explanation of the international distribution of money. The mechanism which he presents consists of an automatic ebb and flow of money into and out of circulation according to the unexplained specific requirements of trade. When because of troubled conditions money is hoarded, the mints coin more bullion, whose source is not explained. When peace returns, money comes out of the hoards, the mints cease to coin bullion, and the excess of money is melted down “either to supply the home trades or for transportation abroad. Thus the buckets work alternately; when money is scarce, bullion is coined; when bullion is scarce, money is melted.” He fails to relate this process either to price movements or to movements in the balance of trade.

Samuel Pratt, in 1696, urged that funds be voted to the king to meet the expenses of his Continental armies and denied that the consequent remittances to the Continent would drain England of its silver by an argument which not only corrects the “sinews-of-war” emphasis on money but, in spite of its compactness, is a satisfactory statement of the self-regulating mechanism if, as seems to me reasonable, “cheapness of silver” may be interpreted as meaning high commodity prices:

Which uncoined silver will for the most part find its way back again, because the carrying over so much every year will glut that place to which ‘tis carried so that silver will become cheap there, and they must disgorge at the best market; which England, in all probability, will be. And the effect of that overbalance which foreigners must, as cases now stand, get by us, cannot be carried out of the nation but in other commodities besides silver.

William Wood supposes that by accident forty-odd millions of public money were to be found in specie under the ruins of Whitehall, and were paid out to the public creditors, and proceeds to trace the consequences. Interest would fall; either the added bullion would be hoarded or converted into plate, or else prices and wages would rise and exports consequently fall. If the free export of money were not permitted, England, since it now had smaller exports and high prices, would therefore now be worse off instead of better, with the implication that if it were permitted money would be exported in consequence of an unfavorable balance of payments. From which he concludes that a favorable balance of trade is the only way to keep bullion at home.

In 1720, there appeared a remarkable essay of some thirty-odd pages by one Isaac Gervaise, apparently his only publication, in which there is presented an elaborate and closely-reasoned exposition of the nature of international equilibrium and of the self-regulating mechanism whereby specie obtained its “natural” or proper international distribution. In spite of the peculiarities of terminology and the occasional obscurities of exposition by which it is marred, the essay marks a great advance over earlier doctrine in this field. The brilliance of its contents, and its complete oversight by other scholars, due presumably to its rarity, warrant its being dealt with in some detail.

Gervaise starts out with the proposition that gold and silver, which he calls “the grand real measure or denominator of the real value of all things,” tend to be distributed internationally in proportion to population, on the ground that only labor (i.e., the product of labor) can attract specie. He proceeds immediately to qualify this proposition in a manner which indicates that he believes that it is in proportion to national value productivity or real income, and to population only as that is an index of real income, that specie tends to be distributed:

Whenever I mention the quantity of inhabitants, I always suppose that regard which ought to be had to the situation and disposition of the different countries of the world; the same quantity of inhabitants not producing the same effect in all countries, according as their dispositions differ....

If a country should for a time have more than its proportion of specie, this would break the balance between consumption and production. Consumption would exceed production, the excess being met by increased imports or decreased exports. An unfavorable balance of payments would result, which would continue until the proper proportion was restored:

When a nation has attracted a greater proportion of the grand denominator of the world than its proper share, and the cause of that attraction ceases, that nation cannot retain the overplus of its proper proportion of the grand denominator, because in that case the proportion of poor and rich of that nation [i.e., of producers and consumers] is broken; that is to say, the number of rich is too great, in proportion to the poor, so as that nation cannot furnish unto the world that share of labor which is proportioned to that part of the grand denominator it possesses: in which case all the labor of the poor will not balance the expense of the rich. So that there enters in that nation more labor than goes out of it, to balance its want of poor: and as the end of trade is the attracting gold and silver, all that difference of labor is paid in gold and silver, until the denominator be lessened, in proportion to other nations; which also, and at the same time, proportions the number of poor to that of rich.

Gervaise then proceeds to consider the effects of “credit,” or “that time which is allowed in trade.” “As all men one with the other are equally subject to the same passions,” the “denominators,” or currencies, of all the countries are increased in amount by credit in equal proportions: “Credit increases the denominator, and adds unto all things an increase of denomination of value proportioned to the increase of the denominator by credit,” i.e., prices rise in proportion to the increase in currency through credit. If a country should, however, add to its currency by credit in more than due proportion, that increase of credit will act on that nation as if it had drawn an equal sum from a gold or silver mine. It will retain only its proportion of the increase; “so that the rest thereof will in time be drawn off by the labor of other nations, in gold or silver.” The mechanism whereby this will be brought about is explained as follows: the increase in the holdings of currency will lead the holders to increase their consumption of goods; less goods will therefore be available for export; the adverse trade balance will be met by an export of specie. The reverse happens when a country decreases the amount of credit below its due proportion; by a corresponding process gold and silver will be drawn from abroad until its “denominator,” including “credit,” has recovered its proper proportion to that of other countries. Gervaise concedes, however, another temporary possibility: an even balance may be maintained in the foreign trade even though there is increased consumption at home through the surrender (whether for domestic consumption or for export is not indicated) of the nation's “store or capital of exportable labor,” by which Gervaise apparently means that the normal stocks of materials and finished goods may be allowed to run down. But once the available specie and stores of goods had been exhausted, credit would have to be contracted until the “denominator” was again in due proportion.

A relative excess of the “denominator,” or of currency, on the part of a particular country results, through its effect on the trade balance, in a decline in the foreign exchange value of its currency. If its excess of currency is great, so that coin becomes scarce and the exchange value of its currency is low, foreigners having claims for payment against that country in terms of its currency try to reduce their losses by accepting payment in goods and disposing of them abroad for specie. But this results in a rise in the wages of its labor and therefore also (by implication) in the prices of its commodities in terms of that country's currency, and the foreign creditors find that wages and prices abroad are relatively lower, and must therefore dispose of these commodities at a loss. They therefore “cease to credit this nation, by importing into it no more labor than they are sure to export out of it.” In the meanwhile, foreign manufacturers find that because of the reduced value on the foreign exchanges of the currency of the country which has expanded its currency they can afford to pay a high price in its own currency for that country's materials, until the prices of those materials rise more than sufficiently to offset the discount on the exchanges. At this point, where he seems to be well embarked upon an explanation of the manner in which equilibrium is established between a country with a depreciated “credit” currency and a metallic standard outside world, Gervaise unfortunately stops short.

This summary of Gervaise's analysis, which does not do full justice to it, should nevertheless be sufficient to indicate how striking an advance he had made toward a satisfactory exposition of international equilibrium. Although Hume's exposition was superior in its freedom from obsolete terminology and much clearer in its exposition, not until the nineteenth century was there to be a match for the comprehensiveness of Gervaise's account, with its specific provision for the necessity, under equilibrium, of balance between a country's exports and its imports and between its production and its consumption, and with its description of the role of wage rates and exchange rates in the mechanism whereby a disturbed equilibrium is restored. Gervaise, in fact, in approaching the problem from the income rather than from the price angle, proceeded in a manner which many recent writers have found more to their liking than that adopted by Hume and predominantly followed by the classical school, and in this sense was more “modern” than his successors of a century or so later.

Prior, in 1730, expounds one-half of the self-regulating mechanism unobjectionably. After pointing out that the East India trade draws silver from Europe, and thereby creates a scarcity of it in Europe, apparently in relation to both gold and commodities, he says:

And if so much treasure shall flow for any considerable time in the same channel, it may put an end to that trade: for such large remittances in silver must in time make this metal plenty in those parts, and as its quantity increases, its value will lessen; so that by degrees silver may come to bear the same proportion to gold in the East Indies as it does in Europe, and their commodities will rise in proportion.

Jacob Vanderlint, in 1734, states the mechanism well, although his exposition of it is so scattered through his book that it is not possible to quote a compact statement of it. In the following passage, he comes closest to a unified exposition of the mechanism:

But no inconvenience can arise by an unrestrained trade, but very great advantage; since if the cash of the nation be decreased by it, which prohibitions are designed to prevent, those nations that get the cash will certainly find every thing advance in price, as the cash increases among them. And if we, who part with the money, make our plenty great enough to make labor sufficiently cheap, which is always constituted of the price of victuals and drink, our manufactures, and everything else, will soon become so moderate as to turn the balance of trade in our favor, and thereby fetch the money back again.

Vanderlint does not approve of this automatic mechanism when it operates to raise prices, and advocates the encouragement of the use of gold and silver in the arts as a means of preventing a rise of prices when the balance of trade is favorable.

When Hume published his Political Discourses, in 1752, therefore, all the essential elements of the theory of the self-regulating mechanism were already available in previous literature, and several fairly satisfactory attempts to bring them together into a coherent theory had been made. Hume, however, stated the theory with a degree of clarity, ability of exposition, emphasis on its importance, and consistent incorporation with the remainder of his economic views, which most of these earlier writers did not even distantly approach. Since his account of the mechanism is reexamined in a later chapter, attention need be called here only to some particular phases of his analysis. He includes in the general mechanism as an additional equilibrating factor the influence of variations in the exchange rates on commodity trade, a point which apparently no one had hitherto brought directly into an exposition of the larger mechanism of adjustment. He remarks that the mechanism is not peculiar to international trade, but also operates internally between the districts of a single country. He does not quite follow out the consequences of his analysis to what later exponents of it regard as its logical significance for long-run policy, namely, lack of concern about the quantity of money in a country; for without stating the qualifications which would possibly justify his position, he disapproves of paper money which is not merely a certificate of deposit of an equivalent amount of metallic money, because it drives hard money out of the country; he concedes that for wars conducted on foreign soil, and in negotiations with foreign nations, a country derives benefit from an abundance of metallic money at home; and he concedes that an increasing amount of money acts as a stimulus to industry.

After Hume, the self-regulating mechanism was much more frequently and more clearly stated than before. Patrick Murray (Lord Elibank) disapproves of paper money because, on quantity-theory grounds, it results in a rise of prices, a check to exports, and consequent depression, but:

These inconveniences, when arising from a plenty of real money, are fully compensated by the riches which occasioned them, and the above stagnation of trade will last no longer than other states continue to undersell us, which cannot be very long; for the trade of any state will be an inlet to riches, and money will flow in upon it till that state be likewise full, and its entrance be stopped by the same repletion; from that state it will go to another, and so on, till it becomes on a perfect level and equality throughout the whole.

Harris presents an excellent statement of the self-regulating mechanism. Like Vanderlint, however, Harris is too much of a mercantilist to accept with equanimity the consequences of the mechanism when it results in an outward drain of money, and recommends hoarding and conversion of bullion into plate as means of withdrawing bullion from circulation when otherwise an outward drain would ensue. A good statement of the mechanism, in this case free from any mercantilist qualification, is to be found also in Whatley.

Vanderlint, Wood, and Harris, as has been shown, accepted the automatic regulation of the amount of money in circulation, but still retained the mercantilist preoccupation with the amount of bullion in the country, as did Hume also to some extent. A few mercantilists after Hume tried to find a basis for rejecting the automatic mechanism, but with meager results. Wallace replies to Hume that if the amount of paper money increases, trade will increase. Making an unconscious substitution of “export trade” for “trade,” he concludes: “And, as they don't take paper in payment from foreign nations, if they are gainers by trade, they must receive the balance in silver and gold.” Steuart rejects the quantity theory of money, on the ground that prices depend on the demand for, and supply of, commodities, and not on the quantity of specie. He tries half-heartedly to meet Hume's exposition of the self-regulating mechanism by stressing the transitory effects, with reference to hoarding and the volume of production, of the sudden change posited by Hume in the quantity of money. The removal of four-fifths of the money in circulation would annihilate both industry and the industrious. If as a result of the lower prices (all of ?) the stock of English goods were to be exported, it would mean the starvation of the English people. If the quantity of money increases, on the other hand, hoarding will prevent this increase from acting on prices. In any case “reason and experience” refute the quantity theory. At one point he suggests a self-regulating mechanism, whereby money goes into hoards when in excess and comes out when there is scarcity, essentially like North's except that Steuart explains the movement of specie into and out of hoards as governed by the possibility of lending it at interest:

While there is found a sufficient quantity of money for carrying on reciprocal alienations, those money gatherers will not be able to employ their stagnated wealth within the nation; but so soon as this gathering has had the effect of diminishing the specie below the proportion found necessary to carry on the circulation, it will begin to be lent out, and so it will return to circulate for a time, until by the operation of the same causes it will fall back again into its former repositories.

Tucker, in the course of an attempt to refute Hume's argument, follows Hume's ambiguous terminology too closely, and in consequence shifts unconsciously from a discussion of the effects on trade of more money to the effects of more wealth, and proceeds to a discussion of whether a rich country can compete successfully with a poor one, and Hume, in an unsatisfactory reply, himself follows this shift in issues.

One of the mysteries of the history of economic thought is that Adam Smith, although he was intimately acquainted with Hume and with his writings, should have made no reference in the Wealth of Nations to the self-regulating mechanism in terms of price levels and trade balances, and should have been content with an exposition of the international distribution of specie in the already obsolete terms of the requirement by each country, without specific reference to its relative price level, of a definite amount of money to circulate trade. When a country has more money than it needs to circulate its trade, the “channels of circulation” will overflow, and the surplus money will be sent abroad “to seek that profitable employment which it cannot find at home.” What adds to the mystery is that Smith had in his earlier Lectures presented approvingly a good summary of Hume's analysis.

Scarcity of Money.—It was the constant complaint of the mercantilists that England was suffering from “scarcity of money,” and the main objective of the mercantilist proposals, at least during the earlier period, was to relieve this scarcity. Many modern writers accept these complaints at their face value, and cite dubious historical facts as the cause of this scarcity, without either investigating what those who complained meant by “scarcity of money” or analyzing the notion for themselves. The mercantilists who voiced such complaints rarely made clear precisely what they had in mind. But where the context reveals what they were thinking of, they meant by scarcity of money some one or some combination of the following things: men not having enough “money” to buy the things they wanted—i.e., general poverty; merchants not being able to sell their goods in adequate volume—i.e., “slack trade”; merchants not having, or not being able to borrow at moderate rates of interest, enough “money” adequately to finance their operations—i.e., shortage of capital; high interest rates—i.e., scarcity of capital; money of some denominations scarce relative to other denominations—i.e., either a mismanaged currency, or the ordinary condition of a bimetallic currency whenever the market ratios of gold and silver diverge from the mint ratios; low prices; prices too high for the existing supply of money—an impossibility as a continuing phenomenon.

Even contemporary writers saw that these complaints rested on confused or inadequate economic analysis and heaped ridicule upon them. More criticized the notion of scarcity of money as early as 1523; Starkey makes one of the participants in his dialogue deal disrespectfully with it; and Mun and Child, among others, refused to take it seriously:

Lupset: “For, as touching wool and lead, tin, iron, silver and gold, yea, and all things necessary for the life of man, in the abundance whereof standeth very true riches, I think our country may be compared with any other.”

Pole: “... All with one voice cry they lack money, ... and it is nothing like that all should complain without a cause.”

Lupset: “... Men so esteem riches and money, that if they had thereof never so great abundance and plenty, yet they would complain....”

And first concerning the evil or want of silver, I think it hath been, and is a general disease of all nations, and so will continue until the end of the world; for poor and rich complain they never have enough; but it seemeth the malady is grown mortal here with us, and therefore it cries out for remedy. Well, I hope it is but imagination maketh us sick, when all our parts be sound and strong ...

... money seems to vulgar observers most plentiful when there is least occasion for it; and on the contrary, more scarce, as the occasions for the employment thereof are more numerous and advantageous; ... from the same reason it is, that a high rate of usury makes money seem scarce....

I can say in truth, upon my own memory, that men did complain as much of the scarcity of money ever since I knew the world as they do now; nay, the very same persons that now complain of this, and commend that time.

The common confusion between money and what could be bought with money or was valued in terms of money, which was usually the explanation of complaints of scarcity of money, was pointed out by North and by the author of Considerations on the East-India Trade. At least two writers before Hume explained the process of saving, to show that it need not consist merely of the piling-up of a stock of actual money. As has already been shown, arguments for the need of more money for the building-up of a state treasure had become wholly academic after Henry VIII squandered his inheritance, and played little part in later mercantilist discussion. The advocates of paper money and of credit banking helped to undermine the prestige of the precious metals, especially when they claimed that credit and paper money could perform all the functions of metallic money. These considerations, combined with the development of the doctrine of an automatic regulation of monetary supplies, left the monetary doctrines of the mercantilists in a sad state of disrepair, and prepared the way for their definitive exposure by Hume and Smith.

Thrift.—The prevailing glorification of thrift and the acceptance of the accumulation of wealth as the end of production operated in a twofold way to strengthen the hold of the mercantilist doctrines on public opinion. On the one hand, identification of the saving process with the accumulation of the precious metals made acquisition of a greater supply of them the positive side of thrift. The stress on frugality, on the other hand, helped to create a prejudice against imports, which then consisted largely of luxuries. But the force of these considerations was weakened by counter-arguments justifying consumption of luxuries, either for their own sake, on the ground that the end of economic activity was neither production, nor the accumulation of wealth, but consumption, or enjoyment of the good things of life; or as a stimulus to productive activity, whether because free spending quickens trade and circulation, or because the prospect of enjoyment is an incentive to labor and to risk-taking.

Laissez-Faire and Free Trade.—The antecedents of Smith's laissez-faire and free-trade views are probably rightly to be sought mainly in the philosophic literature, and perhaps also in the writings of the physiocrats, rather than in the earlier English economic literature. Hume, no doubt, was an important influence on Adam Smith. But Hume was primarily a philosopher, rather than an economist, and although he must have helped Smith to develop his free-trade views, he remained a moderate protectionist himself. But if Adam Smith had carefully surveyed the earlier English economic literature, including, however, tracts apparently always obscure and already scarce by his time, he would have been able to find very nearly all the materials which he actually used in his attack on the protectionist aspects of the mercantilist doctrine. He would, however, have found them scattered, often imbedded in crudely mercantilist analysis, and often consisting only of stray and vague anticipations of later doctrine of whose full significance their authors showed little or no awareness. Caution is necessary lest more be read into such passages than was really intended by their authors, and there has been great exaggeration of the extent to which free-trade views already prevailed in the English literature before Adam Smith. North, Paterson, the author of Considerations on the East-India trade (1701), Isaac Gervaise, and Whatley are the only writers prior to Adam Smith whom I have found who seem really to have been free traders. But certain elements of doctrine tending to lead to free-trade views were fairly widely prevalent before the publication of the Wealth of Nations. Some of these have already been discussed, for the mercantilist doctrines with respect to the importance of money and of a favorable balance of trade were inconsistent with the principles upon which a free-trade argument could be based, and their refutation was a necessary preliminary to successful formulation of a free-trade doctrine. The formulation of the quantity theory of money and the criticisms and qualifications of the balance-of-trade doctrine prepared the way, therefore, for the emergence of a comprehensive free-trade doctrine. There were other ideas, more immediately related to Adam Smith's argument for free trade, which had attained some degree of currency before he wrote.

There was general agreement that the profit motive was the controlling factor in economic behavior, especially of merchants: “No man in England never seeketh for no common weal, but all and every for his single weal”; “For merchants travail for gain and when gain ceaseth they travail no more”; “Every man will sell his wares at the highest price he may”;“And where it is said that he is a merchant, and that he ought to have the sea open and free for him, and that trades of merchants and merchandise are necessary to export the surplus of our commodities, and then to import other necessaries, and so is favorably to be respected, as to that it is well known that the end of every private merchant is not the common good, but his particular profit, which is only the means which induceth him to trade and traffic”; “Every man almost is taken with the attention to profit. Love doth much, but money doth all”; “Men in trade, more especially than the rest of mankind, are bound by their interest; gain is the end of commerce”; “I am afraid there are but few men in any country who will prefer the public good to their private interest, when they happen to be inconsistent with one another.”

The concept of the “economic man,” instead of being, as is often alleged, an invention of the nineteenth-century classical school, was an important element in the mercantilist doctrine. Between the attitudes of the two schools toward the “economic man,” if the extreme positions of both may be taken for purposes of contrast, there was this important difference, however, that the classical economists argued that men in pursuing their selfish interests were at the same time, by a providential harmony of interests, either rendering the best service of which they were capable to the common good or at least rendering better service than if their activities were closely regulated by government, whereas the mercantilists deplored the selfishness of the merchant and insisted that to prevent it from ruining the nation it was necessary to subject it to rigorous control. When Malynes made the title of one of his tracts read The center of the circle of commerce, or, a refutation of a treatise, intituled the circle of commerce, he did so in order to emphasize his thesis that “gain” was the “center” or objective of those engaged in economic activities, and that the only way to prevent merchants from bringing ruin to the commonwealth by their selfish pursuit of gain was to eliminate by restrictions or penalties the profitability to individuals of certain types of transactions which were opposed to the common interest. In extreme cases this attitude tended to lead to wholesale denunciation of the merchant, and the belief that merchants were governed only by self-interest underlay the fundamental mercantilist doctrine of the need for state regulation of commerce. As Fortrey put it, “the public profits should be in a single power to direct, whose interest is only the benefit of the whole,” i.e., the statesman.

There was nobody to deny that merchants were governed only or predominantly by self-interest, but some spokesmen for the merchants replied that so were the other classes, and asked the old question: quis custodiet custodes? or warned that those who counseled interference by government with the operations of merchants, especially if they were merchants themselves, probably had some private ax to grind. There follow a few citations illustrating these points of view:

And in general all those who are lazy, and do not, or are not active enough, and cannot look out, to vent the product of their estates, or to trade with it themselves, would have all traders forced by laws, to bring home to them sufficient prices, whether they gain or lose by it.

There is hardly a commerce, but the dealers in it will affirm, we lose by all the rest; and yet it is evident that in time of peace the kingdom gets by trade in general.

... most of the laws that have been made relating to trade, since the Act of Navigation, may be presumed were calculated rather for particular interests than public good; more to advance some tradesmen than the trade of the nation.

... only to manage a little conceit or selfish intrigue, to encourage and procure a monopoly, exclusion, pre-emption, and restraints or prohibitions; ... to restrain, prohibit, and disjoin, not [only] the industry of His Majesty's subjects with other nations, but even with and respect to one another. They will find that all these and many more pretended encouragements are so far from the things they are called, that they are not only intrigues to make private advantage from the ruin of the public, and arise from the mistaken notions and conceits of unthinking men, who neither have temper nor allow themselves time or opportunity to consider things as they are, —but only take them as they seem to be,—a sort of presumptuous meddlers, who are continually apt to confound effects with causes, and causes with effects, —and not to measure the trade, or improvement of house, family, or country, and even that of the universe, by the nature and extent of the thing, but only by their own narrow and mistaken and meán conceptions thereof....

Most of the statutes ... for regulating, directing, or restraining of trade have, we think, been either political blunders, or jobs obtained by artful men, for private advantage, under pretense of public good.

Conflicting counsel was offered as to how to solve this familiar dilemma of public administration, namely, how to regulate in the public interest the selfish activities of individuals while averting the danger lest the regulations themselves be the product of advice or pressure from interested groups. The problem was made to appear even more serious by the general agreement among merchants of all shades of opinion that politicians and landed gentlemen were not competent to regulate trade on the basis of their own judgment. To the solution offered by some that the statesman should take the advice of the merchant, others replied that the merchant was a bad councilor because he always had private interests to serve. Child advised that neither merchants, shopkeepers, nor manufacturers should be accepted as guides until they had become rich, retired from trade, and “by the purchase of lands, become of the same common interest with most of their countrymen.” But this was an argument to suit the occasion of the moment, and intended to discredit particular types of proposals by merchants which did not fit in with his own commercial ambitions. Child had no high opinion of the sort of regulation of trade which would result from the unaided wisdom of the landowner. To a subordinate in the East India Company, who had objected against certain instructions that they seemed to be in violation of the law, Child is reported to have replied:

that he expected his orders were to be his rules, and not the laws of England, which were a heap of nonsense, compiled by a few ignorant country gentlemen, who hardly knew how to make laws for the good government of their own private families, much less for the regulating of companies and foreign commerce.

The general effect of this common discrediting of all advice except such as emanated from one's self must have been to weaken confidence in the possibility of obtaining sound and disinterested advice as to the regulation of trade from any source.

Tending further to weaken confidence in the possibility of the beneficial regulation of trade by government was the frequently repeated argument that such regulation went counter to human nature, and could not succeed as against the power of the profit motive. Some representative instances follow:

... the trade of the world will not be forced, but will find or make its own way free to all appearance of profit....

... if the matter in England, is so prepared for an abatement of interest, that it can not be long obstructed, as he [i.e., “I.C.,” the author of an unnamed contemporary tract—probably Josiah Child] saith it is, we need no law for stating it, for nature will have its course with us, as well as in other countries, and he cannot instance, in any country, where by a law, interest is set under 6 per cent and nature is best let alone unforced.

To pretend after this, that parties shall govern mankind against their gain, is to philosophize wisely upon what may be, and what would be politic to bring to pass; but what no man can say was ever put in practice to any perfection; or can be so by the common principles that govern mankind in the world.... That tradesmen should cease to seek gain and usurers to love large interests; that men that have gain'd money should leave off desiring to get more; and that zeal to a party should prevail over zeal to their families; that men should forfeit their interest for their humor, and serve their politics at the price of their interest.... No, no, it is not to be done; the stream of desire after gain runs too strong in mankind, to bring any thing of that kind to perfection in this age. The thing is so impracticable in its nature, that it seems a token of great ignorance in the humor of the age to suggest it; and a man would be tempted to think those people that do suggest it, do not themselves believe what they say about it.

There is nothing weaker, than pretending to offer particular rules how a country may thrive by foreign traffic. Trade must be suffered to take its own course, and will find its own channel.

... unless our own manufactures are as good of their kinds, and as low in their prices as the same goods of other nations are, they will not sell either abroad or at home. Trade cannot be forced, but manufacture may be improved.

The objections so far considered against government regulation, in the public interest, of the selfish activities of the merchant rested on the incompetence of the regulators, or the unavailability of unbiased advisers, or the inability of government to cope with the strength of the profit motive. A few writers, however, anticipated Adam Smith more or less clearly in formulating his fundamental principle that man in pursuing his own ends was at the same time usually serving the general good, and that unregulated trade was therefore desirable, not merely because it was the lesser of two evils, but because it was positively the servant of the public welfare. The idea of the natural harmony of interests appears already to be present in the following passage from Misselden:

And is it not lawful for merchants to seek their Privatum Commodum in the exercise of their calling? Is not gain the end of trade? Is not the public involved in the private, and the private in the public? What else makes a common wealth, but the private-wealth, if I may say so, of the members thereof in the exercise of commerce amongst themselves, and with foreign nations?

North states it clearly: “That there can be no trade unprofitable to the public; for if any prove so, men leave it off; and wherever the traders thrive, the public, of which they are a part, thrives also.” It is implied in a tract attributed to Child: “... trade is a free agent, and must not be limited or bounded; if it be so in any nation, it will never prosper.” Davenant subscribed to it, although not wholly unqualifiedly:

Trade is in its nature free, finds its own channel and best directeth its own course; and all laws to give it rules and directions, and to limit and circumscribe it, may serve the particular ends of private men, but are seldom advantageous to the public.

More important, in preparing the way for Adam Smith, was Mandeville's more elaborate reasoning in support of individualism and laissez faire, resting on his famous argument that “private vices” such as “avarice” and luxury were “public benefits.” In Hume's economic writings the laissez-faire doctrine is to be found only by implication if at all. Tucker, although in the field of foreign trade policy he continued to be a protectionist of a somewhat extreme type, at one point vigorously asserted the identity of private and public interests and drew laissez-faire conclusions therefrom:

For let the legislature but take care not to make bad laws, and then as to good ones, they will make themselves: that is, the self-love and self-interest of each individual will prompt him to seek such ways of gain, trades, and occupations of life, as by serving himself, will promote the public welfare at the same time. The only thing necessary to be done by positive institutions is, to enforce the observance of voluntary contracts by legal penalties speedily levied....

Indeed, it must be acknowledged with gratitude and pleasure that the legislature of late years hath enacted many excellent laws which have promoted commerce, increased industry, and extended manufactures ... but then the laws in question are such, whose true excellence consists rather in the repeal of absurd and bad laws formerly made, than in any particular positions or maxims of commerce.

But shortly before the publication of the Wealth of Nations, Whatley, obviously under physiocratic influence, made a specific plea for laissez faire on the basis, in part, of the existence of an identity of interest between the individual traders and the state:

Now, though it is hardly to be expected, as above hinted, that princes should allow of a general free trade or intercourse, because they seldom know their own true interest....

Perhaps, in general, it would be better if government meddled no farther with trade, than to protect it, and let it take its course.... It were therefore to be wished, that commerce were as free between all the nations of the world, as it is between the several counties of England: so would all, by mutual communication, obtain more enjoyments.

In the ancient Greek and Roman classics is to be found the doctrine that differences in natural conditions in different countries made trade between these countries mutually profitable. The early Christian philosophers took over this doctrine and gave it a theological flavor. God had endowed different regions with limited but varied products in order to give mankind an incentive to trade, so that through a world economy they would become united in a world society, and as children of one God they would learn to love each other. This was apparently common doctrine among the English theological writers of the sixteenth century and later. This doctrine was taken over to some extent by the lay writers on commercial matters, but they managed ingeniously to adapt the intent of Providence to their own particular views. Extreme mercantilists, who in general were pleading for new or added restrictions on trade, used the doctrine either to justify the restriction of certain products to Englishmen, on the ground that Providence had assigned them to this country, or appealed to the doctrine in support of that branch or type of trade which they wished to have fostered, while conveniently forgetting the doctrine when attacking other branches or types of trades. William Cholmeley at first states the doctrine fairly, bringing out clearly its implication that a tolerant attitude toward imports and raw material exports was proper:

But when I considered how the unsearchable purpose of God hath, by the lack of necessary commodities, driven all the nations of the earth to seek one upon another, and thereby to be knit together in amity and love, I thought, that as this realm lacketh (and that naturally) things necessarily required to the perfecting of our commodities, it might also be a thing natural to the English nation, to be so imperfect of wit that we could never be able to attain to the knowledge of true and perfect workmanship, because God would drive us thereby to suffer other nations to have a commodity by making our commodities [im?]perfect?

Since his main concern, however, was that English wool should be exported only in the form of finished cloth, instead of as raw wool or as undyed cloth, he found a means of reconciling his theology and his patriotism. It would be ingratitude to God to attribute to him the intention of withholding from Englishmen “the aptness of wytt” to become perfect workmen in the weaving and dyeing of cloth, and their failure to do so was not because God intended England to supply foreign weavers and dyers with the necessary wool, but because the English craftsmen were selfish and indolent: “we being beastly minded, and seeking to again much by doing little, every man seeking his own private commodity, without regard of the weal public, do not diligently apply our good wits to the searching out of good knowledge, but to the inventing of subtle deceit (wherein we excel all other nations), to our private advancement, but the decay of the public weal of our country.”

Misselden similarly expounded the benevolent attitude of God toward trade between nations, in the course of a defense of the trading activities of the Merchant Adventurers, of which he was an employed official, but did not let it trouble him in his advocacy of stringent restrictions on branches of trade in which the Merchant Adventures were not directly concerned. Another writer derived from the doctrine the lesson that Providence had assigned wool-raising and the woolen industry to England, and therefore that England should concentrate her efforts on it, and several later writers did call upon it for support of their more liberal views with respect to freedom of trade as against the more extreme mercantilists, much as did Adam Smith in his two famous references to the “invisible hand.”

For it is not the having all things of our own growth on the one hand, and the saving of our money on the other, can make us rich; neither can our increase and plenty in some sense be said to be our wealth, if we have not a suitable vend and consumption thereof; besides, nature hath otherwise provided, and so furnished each particular part of the world with something which the rest want, whereby to preserve a friendship and commerce together.

The various products of different soils and countries is an indication that Providence intended they should be helpful to each other, and mutually supply the necessities of one another.

By the wise appointment of divine Providence, a mutual intercourse and commerce amongst men is both conducive and necessary to their well being. Every man stands in need of the aid of others; and every country may reap advantages by exchanging some of its superfluous products, natural or artificial, for those which it wants of foreign growth.

In a remarkable passage, Henry Home gives credit to Providence for the self-regulating mechanism of international specie flows, as the means by which it is provided that commerce shall be mutually profitable:

It appears the intention of Providence that all nations should benefit by commerce as by sunshine; and it is so ordered, that an unequal balance is prejudicial to the gainers as well as to the losers; the latter are immediate sufferers; but not less so ultimately are the former. This is one remarkable instance, among many, of providential wisdom in conducting human affairs, independent of the will of man, and frequently against his will. The commercial balance held by the hand of Providence is never permitted to preponderate much to one side; and every nation partakes, or may partake, of all the comforts of life. Engrossing is bad policy; and men are prompted, both by interest and duty, to second the plan of Providence, and to preserve, as near as possible, equality in the balance of trade.

International Division of Labor.—A few writers prior to Adam Smith stated or approached closely some of the specific economic arguments for unrestricted trade which were later to serve as the core of the free-trade doctrine of Adam Smith and the English classical school. John Houghton, in 1677, in a tract of free-trade flavor, argued that the same sort of reasoning should be applied to foreign as to domestic trade, since both alike consisted of a mutual exchange of goods, presumably to mutual advantage. Barbon claimed that a reduction of imports as a result of prohibitions would cut off an equivalent amount of exports. Davenant made explicitly a point vital to the free-trade doctrine, but which the nineteenth-century economists often assumed implicitly, namely, that labor had adequate occupational mobility. He claimed that if domestic labor is displaced as a consequence of imports of foreign commodities “these hands can shift from one work to another, without any great prejudice to themselves, or the public.”

Several writers presented arguments in support of the international division of labor, and it requires only mildly generous interpretation to justify the conclusion that they approached more closely than did Adam Smith the high point of free-trade reasoning, the statement of the benefit of regional specialization in terms of comparative advantage. Davenant maintained that the artificially stimulated production of goods for which neither the soil nor the general bent of the people were adapted is never wise, and that the silk and linen industries were suitable only for countries where wages were low. “It is the prudence of a state to see that this industry, and stock, be not diverted from things profitable to the whole, and turned upon objects unprofitable, and perhaps dangerous to the public.” The unknown author of Considerations on the East-India Trade (1701), who has been rightly praised by a number of modern writers, reveals almost no trace of the mercantilist or protectionist fallacies. He meets all objections against the export of bullion or the import of foreign commodities by regarding trade as a voluntary exchange of considerations. If bullion is voluntarily exchanged for Indian manufactures, it must be because the latter are of more value. “To exchange bullion for cloth is to exchange for the less for the greater value.” Cheap imports, he asserts, are the valid objective of foreign trade. He even draws an analogy between foreign trade and labor-saving devices. The fact that Indian wares can be gotten through trade with less expenditure of labor than their production at home would require means that labor is saved and made available for other purposes:

If nine cannot produce above three bushels of wheat in England, if by equal labor they might procure nine bushels from another country, to employ these in agriculture at home, is to employ nine to do no more work than might be done as well by three; ... is the loss of six bushels of wheat; is therefore the loss of so much value.

Isaac Gervaise claimed that for each country, according to the “disposition” or productive capacities of its people and their geographical situation, there was a “natural” apportionment among different industries of its productive resources. If consumption demands were such that with this “natural” apportionment of production some commodities would not be produced in adequate quantities to satisfy the demand, it was best to meet such deficiencies of production by permitting free importation of such commodities from abroad:

Taxes on imports being no more than a degree of prohibition, and prohibition only forcing those manufactures to extend themselves beyond their natural proportions, to the prejudice of those which are, according to the disposition of the country, natural beyond the entire demand of the inhabitants; which lessens or hinders their exportation, in proportion to the prejudice they receive by the increase of those manufactures which are but in part natural, and whereof the importation is prohibited.

This considered, we may conclude, that trade is never in a better condition than when it's natural and free; the forcing it either by laws or taxes being always dangerous: because though the intended benefit or advantage be perceived, it is difficult to perceive its countercoup, whichever is at least in full proportion to the intended benefit: nature not yielding at once, sharpens those countercoups, and commonly causes a greater evil than the intended benefit can balance. Moreover, trade being a tacit and natural agreement to give or furnish a proportion of certain denominations of labor, to be drawn back in like proportion in such other denominations as best suits necessity or fancy, man naturally seeks, and finds, the most easy and natural means of attaining his ends, and cannot be diverted from those means but by force and against his will.

Similar reasoning was presented by Patrick Lindsay. Scotland should discourage rather than encourage industries, such as woolens, which would interfere with the progress of the only “staple,” linen. These other industries had no chance of success in Scotland, and it was better to buy their products from abroad than to attempt to make them at home:

We may then reasonably suppose, on the lowest computation, that we can buy ... those woolen goods 10 and 15 per cent cheaper in England, than we can make them at home; and if we can make linen cloth, and sell it in England from 5 to 10 per cent profit, and purchase, in exchange for it, woolen goods 10 and 15 per cent cheaper than we can make them at home, then are we gainers by this trade from 15 to 20 per cent, and of consequence, so many hands as are employed in the woolen, who might be employed in the linen, just so much does the country lose by their labor.

A few writers were in the rather paradoxical position of adhering to crudely mercantilistic doctrines with respect to the balance of trade, the superiority of exports over imports, or the importance of money, while advocating complete or very nearly complete free trade. Houghton and Vanderlint appear to belong to this group, and also Decker, who advocated free trade as a means of procuring a more favorable balance of trade. Roger Coke was an out-and-out mercantilist in his general analysis, but he nevertheless disapproved of monopolies, the Navigation acts, the restriction of import of cattle from Scotland, and the restrictions on the Irish trade, and did not give explicit support to any trade restrictions in any of his writings that were available for examination. There were other writers who adhered to the mercantilist doctrines without revealing their attitude toward trade regulation.

A constant note in the writings of the merchants was the insistence upon the usefulness to the community of trade and the dignity and social value of the trader, and in the eighteenth century it appears to have become common for others than the traders themselves to accept them at their own valuation. Very often “trade” is not more definitely specified, but no doubt most of the writers who argued for the value of trade meant foreign trade, or even only export trade. But in the general glorification of trade, some of the tracts made no reference to the quantity of money, the balance of trade, or other phases of the mercantilist doctrines. In some cases there was explicit inclusion of imports on a parity with exports as deserving of encouragement, and support of low customs, without explicit discrimination between export and import duties, as a means of fostering trade. The general tendency of such discussion must have been to weaken faith in legislative restriction of trade, and to prepare the way for the acceptance of free-trade views on explicitly stated economic grounds, although on the other side it is to be said that the chief advocates of particular restrictions were merchants.

Free-trade doctrine, however, continued to be a rank heresy, and there were probably some who subscribed to it but who did not dare to expose their peculiar views in print. Violet relates with horror that some men in high positions held such views:

... some men are of an opinion, that they would have trade free, to import all commodities, and export all without any restraint, not for leather, fuller's earth, corn, wool, ammunition, gold and silver, horses, and all other things that are staff and stay of this nation. I would not write it, but I have it affirmed by men of great quality, that this is the opinion of some men that are in place and power.

I believe I have succeeded in showing that all the important elements in Adam Smith's free-trade doctrine had been presented prior to the Wealth of Nations. These were often, however, to be found only in isolated passages not wholly consistent with the views expounded in the surrounding text. There is little evidence that these early expositions had much influence on public opinion in the mass, or even on Hume and Smith. Hume himself discarded the monetary and balance-of-trade doctrines of his time while adhering to protectionism, and Adam Smith both in his Lectures and in the Wealth of Nations relapsed at times into rather crude versions of the mercantilist monetary and balance-of-trade doctrines, as well as into protectionism. In so far as Hume and Smith did not develop their foreign-trade doctrines for themselves, it seems likely that their chief indebtedness was to the philosophers, rather than to the earlier English economic literature. In the literature before Hume there is scarcely any discussion of the anticipations of free-trade doctrine examined in the foregoing, even for purposes of refutation, and most of the controversy is between exponents of rival schemes of regulation, or between extreme and moderate mercantilists, rather than between mercantilists and free traders.

In many respects, indeed, as the mercantilist argument became more elaborate and involved, it became more objectionable from the point of view of modern doctrine, and, except with reference to the bullionist doctrines, a strong argument could be presented in defense of the thesis that the mass of ordinary tracts on trade of the first half of the eighteenth century showed a more extreme and confused adherence to the fallacies of mercantilism than did the writings of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The simplicity and brevity of the early analysis at least resulted in fallacies of comparable simplicity, but the later writers were able to assemble a greater variety of fallacies into an elaborate system of confused and self-contradictory argument. In so far as trade theory was concerned, such progress as occurred was due almost solely to a small group of capable writers, able to analyze economic problems more acutely and logically than their predecessors, but not able to make a marked impression upon their contemporaries or even to attract their attention. Even Hume made few converts in England, and his influence on the physiocrats was more apparent than on the English writers of his own generation. On legislation, it is not evident that the critics of mercantilism had much influence, and it could be seriously argued that, with the exception of the disappearance of the bullionist regulations, the general course of foreign-trade legislation from 1600 to after Adam Smith was, without important exception, away from, rather than toward, conformity with the doctrines of the critics of mercantilism.