IV
The Puritan Movement
“And the Lorde was with Joseph, and he was a luckie felowe.”
Genesis 39:2 (Tyndale’s translation)
By the end of the sixteenth century the divorce between religious theory and economic realities had long been evident. But in the meantime, within the bosom of religious theory itself, a new system of ideas was being matured, which was destined to revolutionize all traditional values, and to turn on the whole field of social obligations a new and penetrating light. On a world heaving with expanding energies, and on a Church uncertain of itself, rose, after two generations of premonitory mutterings, the tremendous storm of the Puritan movement. The forest bent; the oaks snapped; the dry leaves were driven before a gale, neither all of winter nor all of spring, but violent and life-giving, pitiless and tender, sounding strange notes of yearning and contrition, as of voices wrung from a people dwelling in Meshec, which signifies Prolonging, in Kedar, which signifies Blackness; while amid the blare of trumpets, and the clash of arms, and the rending of the carved work of the Temple, humble to God and haughty to man, the soldier-saints swept over battlefield and scaffold their garments rolled in blood.
In the great silence which fell when the Titans had turned to dust, in the Augustan calm of the eighteenth century, a voice was heard to observe that religious liberty was a considerable advantage, regarded “merely in a commercial view.”295 A new world, it was evident, had arisen. And this new world, born of the vision of the mystic, the passion of the prophet, the sweat and agony of heroes famous and unknown, as well as of mundane ambitions and commonplace cupidities, was one in which, since “Thorough” was no more, since property was secure, and contracts inviolable, and the executive tamed, the judicious investments of business men were likely to yield a profitable return. So the epitaph, which crowns the life of what is called success, mocks the dreams in which youth hungered, not for success, but for the glorious failure of the martyr or the saint.
I
Puritanism and Society
The principal streams which descended in England from the teaching of Calvin were three—Presbyterianism, Congregationalism, and a doctrine of the nature of God and man, which, if common to both, was more widely diffused, more pervasive and more potent than either. Of these three offshoots from the parent stem, the first and eldest, which had made some stir under Elizabeth, and which it was hoped, with judicious watering from the Scotch, might grow into a State Church, was to produce a credal statement carved in bronze, but was to strike, at least in its original guise, but slender roots. The second, with its insistence on the right of every Church to organize itself, and on the freedom of all Churches from the interference of the State, was to leave, alike in the Old World and in the New, an imperishable legacy of civil and religious liberty. The third was Puritanism. Straitened to no single sect, and represented in the Anglican Church hardly, if at all, less fully than in those which afterwards separated from it, it determined, not only conceptions of theology and church government, but political aspirations, business relations, family life and the minutiae of personal behavior.
The growth, triumph and transformation of the Puritan spirit was the most fundamental movement of the seventeenth century. Puritanism, not the Tudor secession from Rome, was the true English Reformation, and it is from its struggle against the old order that an England which is unmistakably modern emerges. But, immense as were its accomplishments on the high stage of public affairs, its achievements in that inner world, of which politics are but the squalid scaffolding, were mightier still. Like an iceberg, which can awe the traveller by its towering majesty only because sustained by a vaster mass which escapes his eye, the revolution which Puritanism wrought in Church and State was less than that which it worked in men’s souls, and the watchwords which it thundered, amid the hum of Parliaments and the roar of battles, had been learned in the lonely nights, when Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord to wring a blessing before he fled.
We do it wrong, being so majestical
To offer it the show of violence.
In the mysticism of Bunyan and Fox, in the brooding melancholy and glowing energy of Cromwell, in the victorious tranquillity of Milton, “unshaken, unseduced, unterrified,” amid a world of self-seekers and apostates, there are depths of light and darkness which posterity can observe with reverence or with horror, but which its small fathom-line cannot plumb.
There are types of character which are like a prism, whose various and brilliant colors are but broken reflections of a single ray of concentrated light. If the inward and spiritual grace of Puritanism eludes the historian, its outward and visible signs meet him at every turn, and not less in marketplace and countinghouse and camp than in the student’s chamber and the gathering of the elect for prayer. For to the Puritan, a contemner of the vain shows of sacramentalism, mundane toil becomes itself a kind of sacrament. Like a man who strives by unresting activity to exorcise a haunting demon, the Puritan, in the effort to save his own soul, sets in motion every force in heaven above or in the earth beneath. By the mere energy of his expanding spirit, he remakes, not only his own character and habits and way of life, but family and church, industry and city, political institutions and social order. Conscious that he is but a stranger and pilgrim, hurrying from this transitory life to a life to come, he turns with almost physical horror from the vanities which lull into an awful indifference souls dwelling on the borders of eternity, to pore with anguish of spirit on the grand facts, God, the soul, salvation and damnation. “It made the world seem to me,” said a Puritan of his conversion, “as a carkass that had neither life nor loveliness. And it destroyed those ambitious desires after literate fame, which was the sin of my childhood. … It set me upon that method of my studies which since then I have found the benefit of. … It caused me first to seek God’s Kingdom and his Righteousness, and most to mind the One thing needful, and to determine first of my Ultimate End.”296
Overwhelmed by a sense of his “Ultimate End,” the Puritan cannot rest, nevertheless, in reflection upon it. The contemplation of God, which the greatest of the Schoolmen described as the supreme blessedness, is a blessedness too great for sinners, who must not only contemplate God, but glorify him by their work in a world given over to the powers of darkness. “The way to the Celestial City lies just through this town, where this lusty fair is kept; and he that will go to the City, and yet not go through this town, must needs go out of the world.”297 For that awful journey, girt with precipices and beset with fiends, he sheds every encumbrance, and arms himself with every weapon. Amusements, books, even intercourse with friends, must, if need be, be cast aside; for it is better to enter into eternal life halt and maimed than having two eyes to be cast into eternal fire. He scours the country, like Baxter and Fox, to find one who may speak the word of life to his soul. He seeks from his ministers, not absolution, but instruction, exhortation and warning. Prophesyings—that most revealing episode in early Puritanism—were the cry of a famished generation for enlightenment, for education, for a religion of the intellect; and it was because much “preaching breeds faction, but much praying causes devotion”298 that the powers of this world raised their parchment shutters to stem the gale that blew from the Puritan pulpit. He disciplines, rationalizes, systematizes, his life; “method” was a Puritan catchword a century before the world had heard of Methodists. He makes his very business a travail of the spirit, for that too is the Lord’s vineyard, in which he is called to labor.
Feeling in him that which “maketh him more fearful of displeasing God than all the world,”299 he is a natural republican, for there is none on earth that he can own as master. If powers and principalities will hear and obey, well; if not, they must be ground into dust, that on their ruins the elect may build the Kingdom of Christ. And, in the end, all these—prayer, and toil, and discipline, mastery of self and mastery of others, wounds, and death—may be too little for the salvation of a single soul. “Then I saw that there was a way to Hell even from the Gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction”300—those dreadful words haunt him as he nears his end. Sometimes they break his heart. More often, for grace abounds even to the chief of sinners, they nerve his will. For it is will—will organized and disciplined and inspired, will quiescent in rapt adoration or straining in violent energy, but always will—which is the essence of Puritanism, and for the intensification and organization of will every instrument in that tremendous arsenal of religious fervour is mobilized. The Puritan is like a steel spring compressed by an inner force, which shatters every obstacle by its rebound. Sometimes the strain is too tense, and, when its imprisoned energy is released, it shatters itself.
The spirit bloweth where it listeth, and men of every social grade had felt their hearts lifted by its breath, from aristocrats and country gentlemen to weavers who, “as they stand in their loom, can set a book before them or edifie one another.”301 But, if religious zeal and moral enthusiasm are not straitened by the vulgar categories of class and income, experience proves, nevertheless, that there are certain kinds of environment in which they burn more bravely than in others, and that, as man is both spirit and body, so different types of religious experience correspond to the varying needs of different social and economic milieux. To contemporaries the chosen seat of the Puritan spirit seemed to be those classes in society which combined economic independence, education and a certain decent pride in their status, revealed at once in a determination to live their own lives, without truckling to earthly superiors, and in a somewhat arrogant contempt for those who, either through weakness of character or through economic helplessness, were less resolute, less vigorous and masterful, than themselves. Such, where the feudal spirit had been weakened by contact with town life and new intellectual currents, were some of the gentry. Such, conspicuously, were the yeomen, “mounted on a high spirit, as being slaves to none,”302 especially in the freeholding counties of the east. Such, above all, were the trading classes of the towns, and of those rural districts which had been partially industrialized by the decentralization of the textile and iron industries.
“The King’s cause and party,” wrote one who described the situation in Bristol in 1645, “were favored by two extremes in that city; the one, the wealthy and powerful men, the other, of the basest and lowest sort; but disgusted by the middle rank, the true and best citizens.”303 That it was everywhere these classes who were the standard-bearers of Puritanism is suggested by Professor Usher’s statistical estimate of the distribution of Puritan ministers in the first decade of the seventeenth century, which shows that, of 281 ministers whose names are known, 35 belonged to London and Middlesex, 96 to the three manufacturing counties of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex, 29 to Northamptonshire, 17 to Lancashire, and only 104 to the whole of the rest of the country.304 The phenomenon was so striking as to evoke the comments of contemporaries absorbed in matters of profounder spiritual import than sociological generalization. “Most of the tenants of these gentlemen,” wrote Baxter, “and also most of the poorest of the people, whom the other called the Rabble, did follow the gentry, and were for the King. On the Parliament’s side were (besides themselves) the smaller part (as some thought) of the gentry in most of the counties, and freeholders, and the middle sort of men; especially in those corporations and counties which depend on clothing and such manufactures.” He explained the fact by the liberalizing effect of constant correspondence with the greater centers of trade, and cited the example of France, where it was “the merchants and middle sort of men that were Protestants.”305
The most conspicuous example was, of course, London, which had financed the Parliamentary forces, and which continued down to the Revolution to be par excellence “the rebellious city,” returning four Dissenters to the Royalist Parliament of 1661, sending its mayor and aldermen to accompany Lord Russell when he carried the Exclusion Bill from the Commons to the Lords, patronizing Presbyterian ministers long after Presbyterianism was proscribed, nursing the Whig Party, which stood for tolerance, and sheltering the Whig leaders against the storm which broke in 1681. But almost everywhere the same fact was to be observed. The growth of Puritanism, wrote a hostile critic, was “by meanes of the City of London (the nest and seminary of the seditious faction) and by reason of its universall trade throughout the kingdome, with its commodities conveying and deriving this civill contagion to all our cities and corporations, and thereby poysoning whole counties.”306 In Lancashire, the clothing towns—“the Genevas of Lancashire”—rose like Puritan islands from the surrounding sea of Roman Catholicism. In Yorkshire, Bradford, Leeds and Halifax; in the midlands, Birmingham and Leicester; in the west, Gloucester, Taunton and Exeter, the capital of the west of England textile industry, were all centers of Puritanism.
The identification of the industrial and commercial classes with religious radicalism was, indeed, a constant theme of Anglicans and Royalists, who found in the vices of each an additional reason for distrusting both. Clarendon commented bitterly on the “factious humor which possessed most corporations, and the pride of their wealth”;307 and, after the Civil War, both the politics and the religion of the boroughs were suspect for a generation. The bishop of Oxford warned Charles II’s Government against showing them any favor, on the ground that “trading combinations” were “so many nests of faction and sedition,” and that “our late miserable distractions” were “chiefly hatched in the shops of tradesmen.”308 Pepys commented dryly on the black looks which met the Anglican clergy as they returned to their City churches. It was even alleged that the courtiers hailed with glee the fire of London, as a providential instrument for crippling the center of disaffection.309
When, after 1660, Political Arithmetic became the fashion, its practitioners were moved by the experience of the last half-century and by the example of Holland—the economic schoolmaster of seventeenth-century Europe—to inquire, in the manner of any modern sociologist, into the relations between economic progress and other aspects of the national genius. Cool, dispassionate, very weary of the drum ecclesiastic, they confirmed, not without some notes of gentle irony, the diagnosis of bishop and presbyterian, but deduced from it different conclusions. The question which gave a topical point to their analysis was the rising issue of religious tolerance. Serenely indifferent to its spiritual significance, they found a practical reason for applauding it in the fact that the classes who were in the van of the Puritan movement, and in whom the Clarendon Code found its most prominent victims, were also those who led commercial and industrial enterprise. The explanation, they thought, was simple. A society of peasants could be homogeneous in its religion, as it was already homogeneous in the simple uniformity of its economic arrangements. A many-sided business community could escape constant friction and obstruction only if it were free to absorb elements drawn from a multitude of different sources, and if each of those elements were free to pursue its own way of life, and—in that age the same thing—to practice its own religion.
Englishmen, as Defoe remarked, improved everything and invented nothing, and English economic organization had long been elastic enough to swallow Flemish weavers flying from Alva, and Huguenots driven from France. But the traditional ecclesiastical system was not equally accommodating. It found not only the alien refugee, but its home-bred sectaries, indigestible. Laud, reversing the policy of Elizabethan Privy Councils, which characteristically thought diversity of trades more important than unity of religion, had harassed the settlements of foreign artisans at Maidstone, Sandwich and Canterbury,310 and the problem recurred in every attempt to enforce conformity down to 1689. “The gaols were crowded with the most substantial tradesmen and inhabitants, the clothiers were forced from their houses, and thousands of workmen and women whom they employed set to starving.”311 The Whig indictment of the disastrous effects of Tory policy recalls the picture drawn by French intendants of the widespread distress which followed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.312
When the collision between economic interests and the policy of compulsory conformity was so flagrant, it is not surprising that the economists of the age should have enunciated the healing principle that persecution was incompatible with prosperity, since it was on the pioneers of economic progress that persecution principally fell. “Every law of this nature,” wrote the author of a pamphlet on the subject, is not only “expressly against the very principles and rules of the Gospel of Christ,” but is also “destructive to the trade and well-being of our nation by oppressing and driving away the most industrious working hands, and depopulating, and thereby impoverishes our country, which is capable of employing ten times the number of people we now have.”313
Temple, in his calm and lucid study of the United Netherlands, found one reason of their success in the fact that, Roman Catholicism excepted, every man might practise what religion he pleased.314 De la Court, whose striking book passed under the name of John de Witt, said the same.315 Petty, after pointing out that in England the most thriving towns were those where there was most nonconformity, cited the evidence, not only of Europe, but of India and the Ottoman Empire, to prove that, while economic progress is compatible with any religion, the class which is its vehicle will always consist of the heterodox minority, who “profess opinions different from what are publicly established.”316 “There is a kind of natural unaptness,” wrote a pamphleteer in 1671, “in the Popish religion to business, whereas on the contrary among the Reformed, the greater their zeal, the greater their inclination to trade and industry, as holding idleness unlawful. … The domestic interest of England lieth in the advancement of trade by removing all obstructions both in city and country, and providing such laws as may help it, and make it most easy, especially in giving liberty of conscience to all Protestant Nonconformists, and denying it to Papists.”317
If the economists applauded tolerance because it was good for trade, the Tory distrust of the commercial classes was aggravated by the fact that it was they who were most vocal in the demand for tolerance. Swift denounced, as part of the same odious creed, the maxim that “religion ought to make no distinction between Protestants” and the policy “of preferring, on all occasions, the monied interests before the landed.”318 Even later in the eighteenth century, the stale gibe of “the Presbyterians, the Bank and the other corporations” still figured in the pamphlets of the statesman whom Lord Morley describes as the prince of political charlatans, Bolingbroke.319
“The middle ranks,” “the middle class of men,” “the middle sort”—such social strata included, of course, the widest variety of economic interest and personal position. But in the formative period of Puritanism, before the Civil War, two causes prevented the phrase from being merely the vapid substitute for thought which it is today. In the first place, outside certain exceptional industries and districts, there was little large-scale production and no massed proletariat of propertyless wage-earners. As a result, the typical workman was still normally a small master, who continued himself to work at the loom or at the forge, and whose position was that described in Baxter’s Kidderminster, where “there were none of the tradesmen very rich … the magistrates of the town were few of them worth £40 per annum, and most not half so much; three or four of the richest thriving masters of the trade got but about £500 to £600 in twenty years, and it may be lost £100 of it at once by an ill debtor.”320 Differing in wealth from the prosperous merchant or clothier, such men resembled them in economic and social habits, and the distinction between them was one of degree, not of kind. In the world of industry vertical divisions between district and district still cut deeper than horizontal fissures between class and class. The number of those who could reasonably be described as independent, since they owned their own tools and controlled their own businesses, formed a far larger proportion of the population than is the case in capitalist societies.
The second fact was even more decisive. The business classes, as a power in the State, were still sufficiently young to be conscious of themselves as something like a separate order, with an outlook on religion and politics peculiarly their own, distinguished, not merely by birth and breeding, but by their social habits, their business discipline, the whole bracing atmosphere of their moral life, from a Court which they believed to be godless and an aristocracy which they knew to be spendthrift. The estrangement—for it was no more—was of shorter duration in England than in any other European country, except Switzerland and Holland. By the latter part of the seventeenth century, partly as a result of the common struggles which made the Revolution, still more perhaps through the redistribution of wealth by commerce and finance, the former rivals were on the way to be compounded in the gilded clay of a plutocracy embracing both. The landed gentry were increasingly sending their sons into business; “the tradesman meek and much a liar” looked forward, as a matter of course, to buying an estate from a bankrupt noble. Georgian England was to astonish foreign observers, like Voltaire and Montesquieu, as the Paradise of the bourgeoisie, in which the prosperous merchant shouldered easily aside the impoverished bearers of aristocratic names.321
That consummation, however, was subsequent to the great divide of the Civil War, and, in the main, to the tamer glories of the Revolution. In the germinating period of Puritanism, the commercial classes, though powerful, were not yet the dominant force which a century later they were to become. They could look back on a not distant past, in which their swift rise to prosperity had been regarded with suspicion, as the emergence of an alien interest, which applied sordid means to the pursuit of antisocial ends—an interest for which in a well-ordered commonwealth there was little room, and which had been rapped on the knuckles by conservative statesmen. They lived in a present, where a Government, at once interfering, inefficient and extravagant, cultivated, with an intolerable iteration of grandiloquent principles, every shift and artifice most repugnant to the sober prudence of plain-dealing men. The less reputable courtiers and the more feather-pated provincial gentry, while courting them to raise a mortgage or renew a loan, reviled them as parvenus, usurers and bloodsuckers. Even in the latter part of the seventeenth century, the influence of the rentier and of the financier still continued to cause apprehension and jealousy, both for political and for economic reasons. “By this single stratagem,” wrote an indignant pamphleteer of the Puritan capitalists who specialized in money-lending, “they avoyd all contributions of tithes and taxes to the King, Church, Poor (a soverain cordial to tender consciences); they decline all services and offices of burthen incident to visible estates; they escape all oaths and ties of publick allegiance or private fealty. … They enjoy both the secular applause of prudent conduct, and withal the spiritual comfort of thriving easily and devoutly … leaving their adversaries the censures of improvidence, together with the misery of decay. They keep many of the nobility and gentry in perfect vassalage (as their poor copyholders), which eclipses honour, enervates justice and ofttimes protects them in their boldest conceptions. By engrossing cash and credit, they in effect give the price to land and law to markets. By commanding ready money, they likewise command such offices as they widely affect … they feather and enlarge their own nests, the corporations.”322
Such lamentations, the protest of senatorial dignity against equestrian upstarts or of the noblesse against the roturier, were natural in a conservative aristocracy, which for a century had felt authority and prestige slipping from its grasp, and which could only maintain its hold on them by resigning itself, as ultimately it did, to sharing them with its rival. In return, the business world, which had its own religious and political ideology, steadily gathered the realities of power into its own hands; asked with a sneer, “how would merchants thrive if gentlemen would not be unthriftes”;323 and vented the indignant contempt felt by an energetic, successful and, according to its lights, not too unscrupulous, generation for a class of fainéants, unversed in the new learning of the City and incompetent to the verge of immorality in the management of business affairs. Their triumphs in the past, their strength in the present, their confidence in the future, their faith in themselves, and their difference from their feebler neighbours—a difference as of an iron wedge in a lump of clay—made them, to use a modern phrase, class-conscious. Like the modern proletarian, who feels that, whatever his personal misery and his present disappointments, the Cause is rolled forward to victory by the irresistible force of an inevitable evolution, the Puritan bourgeoisie knew that against the chosen people the gates of hell could not prevail. The Lord prospered their doings.
There is a magic mirror in which each order and organ of society, as the consciousness of its character and destiny dawns upon it, looks for a moment, before the dust of conflict or the glamour of success obscures its vision. In that enchanted glass, it sees its own lineaments reflected with ravishing allurements; for what it sees is not what it is, but what in the eyes of mankind and of its own heart it would be. The feudal noblesse had looked, and had caught a glimpse of a world of fealty and chivalry and honor. The monarchy looked, or Laud and Strafford looked for it; they saw a nation drinking the blessings of material prosperity and spiritual edification from the cornucopia of a sage and paternal monarchy—a nation “fortified and adorned … the country rich … the Church flourishing … trade increased to that degree that we were the exchange of Christendom … all foreign merchants looking upon nothing as their own but what they laid up in the warehouses of this Kingdom.”324 In a far-off day the craftsman and laborer were to look, and see a band of comrades, where fellowship should be known for life and lack of fellowship for death. For the middle classes of the early seventeenth century, rising but not yet triumphant, that enchanted mirror was Puritanism. What it showed was a picture grave to sternness, yet not untouched with a sober exaltation—an earnest, zealous, godly generation, scorning delights, punctual in labor, constant in prayer, thrifty and thriving, filled with a decent pride in themselves and their calling, assured that strenuous toil is acceptable to Heaven, a people like those Dutch Calvinists whose economic triumphs were as famous as their iron Protestantism—“thinking, sober, and patient men, and such as believe that labor and industry is their duty towards God.”325 Then an air stirred and the glass was dimmed. It was long before any questioned it again.
II
A Godly Discipline Versus the Religion of Trade
Puritanism was the schoolmaster of the English middle classes. It heightened their virtues, sanctified, without eradicating, their convenient vices, and gave them an inexpugnable assurance that, behind virtues and vices alike, stood the majestic and inexorable laws of an omnipotent Providence, without whose foreknowledge not a hammer could beat upon the forge, not a figure could be added to the ledger. But it is a strange school which does not teach more than one lesson, and the social reactions of Puritanism, trenchant, permanent and profound, are not to be summarized in the simple formula that it fostered individualism. Weber, in a celebrated essay, expounded the thesis that Calvinism, in its English version, was the parent of capitalism, and Troeltsch, Schulze-Gaevernitz and Cunningham have lent to the same interpretation the weight of their considerable authority.326 But the heart of man holds mysteries of contradiction which live in vigorous incompatibility together. When the shriveled tissues lie in our hand, the spiritual bond still eludes us.
In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant. The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action. There was in Puritanism an element which was conservative and traditionalist, and an element which was revolutionary; a collectivism which grasped at an iron discipline, and an individualism which spurned the savorless mess of human ordinances; a sober prudence which would garner the fruits of this world, and a divine recklessness which would make all things new. For long nourished together, their discords concealed, in the furnace of the Civil War they fell apart, and Presbyterian and Independent, aristocrat and Leveller, politician and merchant and utopian, gazed with bewildered eyes on the strange monsters with whom they had walked as friends. Then the splendors and illusions vanished; the force of common things prevailed; the metal cooled in the mould; and the Puritan spirit, shorn of its splendors and its illusions, settled finally into its decent bed of equable respectability. But each element in its social philosophy had once been as vital as the other, and the battle was fought, not between a Puritanism solid for one view and a State committed to another, but between rival tendencies in the soul of Puritanism itself. The problem is to grasp their connection, and to understand the reasons which caused this to wax and that to wane.
“The triumph of Puritanism,” it has been said, “swept away all traces of any restriction or guidance in the employment of money.”327 That it swept away the restrictions imposed by the existing machinery is true; neither ecclesiastical courts, nor High Commission, nor Star Chamber, could function after 1640. But, if it broke the discipline of the Church of Laud and the State of Strafford, it did so but as a step towards erecting a more rigorous discipline of its own. It would have been scandalized by economic individualism as much as by religious tolerance, and the broad outlines of its scheme of organization favored unrestricted liberty in matters of business as little as in the things of the spirit. To the Puritan of any period in the century between the accession of Elizabeth and the Civil War, the suggestion that he was the friend of economic or social license would have seemed as wildly inappropriate as it would have appeared to most of his critics, who taunted him, except in the single matter of usury, with an intolerable meticulousness.
A godly discipline was, indeed, the very ark of the Puritan covenant. Delivered in thunder to the Moses of Geneva, its vital necessity had been the theme of the Joshuas of Scotland, England and France. Knox produced a Scottish edition of it; Cartwright, Travers and Udall composed treatises expounding it. Bancroft exposed its perils for the established ecclesiastical order.328 The word “discipline” implied essentially, “a directory of Church government,” established in order that, “the wicked may be corrected with ecclesiastical censures, according to the quality of the fault”;329 and the proceedings of Puritan classes in the sixteenth century show that the conception of a rule of life, to be enforced by the pressure of the common conscience, and in the last resort by spiritual penalties, was a vital part of their system. When, at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, the sectaries in London described their objects as not merely the “free and pure” preaching of the Gospel, nor the pure ministration of the sacraments, but, “to have, not the fylthye cannon lawe, but disciplyne onelye and altogether agreeable to the same heavenlye and Allmightye word of our good Lorde Jesus Chryste,”330 the antithesis suggests that something more than verbal instruction is intended. Bancroft noted that it was the practice, when a sin was committed by one of the faithful, for the elders to apply first admonishment and then excommunication. The minute-book of one of the few classes whose records survive confirms his statement.331
All this early movement had almost flickered out before the end of the sixteenth century. But the conception lay at the very root of Presbyterianism, and it reemerged in the system of church government which the supercilious Scotch Commissioners at the Westminster Assembly steered to inconclusive victory, between Erastians on the right and Independents on the left. The destruction of the Court of High Commission, of the temporal jurisdiction of all persons in Holy Orders, and finally, with the abolition of episcopacy, of the ecclesiastical courts themselves, left a vacuum. “Mr. Henderson,” wrote the insufferable Baillie, “has ready now a short treatise, much called for, of our church discipline.”332 In June 1646 an unenthusiastic Parliament accepted the ordinance which, after a three years’ debate of intolerable tedium, emerged from the Assembly’s Committee on the Discipline and Government of the Church, and which provided for the suspension by the elders of persons guilty of scandalous offences. Detested by the Independents and cold-shouldered by Parliament, which had no intention of admitting the divine right of presbyteries, the system never took deep root, and in London, at least, there appears to be no evidence of any exercise of jurisdiction by elders or classes. In parts of Lancashire, on the other hand, it seems to have been actively at work, down, at any rate, to 1649. The change in the political situation, in particular the triumph of the army, prevented it, Mr. Shaw thinks, from functioning longer.333
“Discipline” included all questions of moral conduct, and of these, in an age when a great mass of economic relations were not the almost automatic reactions of an impersonal mechanism, but a matter of human kindliness or meanness between neighbors in village or borough, economic conduct was naturally part. Calvin and Beza, perpetuating with a new intensity the medieval idea of a Church-civilization, had sought to make Geneva a pattern, not only of doctrinal purity, but of social righteousness and commercial morality. Those who had drunk from their spring continued, in even less promising environments, the same tradition. Bucer, who wrote when something more fundamental than a politician’s reformation seemed possible to enthusiasts with their eyes on Geneva, had urged the reconstruction of every side of the economic life of a society which was to be Church and State in one.334 English Puritanism, while accepting after some hesitation Calvin’s much qualified condonation of moderate interest, did not intend in other respects to countenance a laxity welcome only to worldlings. Knewstub appealed to the teaching of “that worthy instrument of God, Mr. Calvin,” to prove that the habitual usurer ought to be “thrust out of the society of men.” Smith embroidered the same theme. Baro, whose Puritanism lost him his professorship, denounced the “usual practice amongst rich men, and some of the greater sort, who by lending, or by giving out their money to usury, are wont to snare and oppress the poor and needier sort.” Cartwright, the most famous leader of Elizabethan Puritanism, described usury as “a hainous offence against God and his Church,” and laid down that the offender should be excluded from the sacraments until he satisfied the congregation of his penitence.335 The ideal of all was that expressed in the apostolic injunction to be content with a modest competence and to shun the allurements of riches. “Every Christian man is bound in conscience before God,” wrote Stubbes, “to provide for his household and family, but yet so as his immoderate care surpasse not the bands, nor yet transcend the limits, of true Godlynes. … So farre from covetousnes and from immoderate care would the Lord have us, that we ought not this day to care for tomorrow, for (saith he) sufficient to the day is the travail of the same.”336
The most influential work on social ethics written in the first half of the seventeenth century from the Puritan standpoint was Ames’ De Conscientia, a manual of Christian conduct which was intended to supply the brethren with the practical guidance which had been offered in the Middle Ages by such works as Dives et Pauper. It became a standard authority, quoted again and again by subsequent writers. Forbidden to preach by the bishop of London, Ames spent more than twenty years in Holland, where he held a chair of theology at the University of Franeker, and his experience of social life in the country which was then the business capital of Europe makes the remorseless rigor of his social doctrine the more remarkable. He accepts, as in his day was inevitable, the impossibility of distinguishing between interest on capital invested in business, and interest on capital invested in land, since men put money indifferently into both, and, like Calvin, he denies that interest is forbidden in principle by Scripture or natural reason. But, like Calvin, he surrounds his indulgence with qualifications; he requires that no interest shall be charged on loans to the needy, and describes as the ideal investment for Christians one in which the lender shares risks with the borrower, and demands only “a fair share of the profits, according to the degree in which God has blessed him by whom the money is used.” His teaching with regard to prices is not less conservative. “To wish to buy cheap and to sell dear is common (as Augustine observes), but it is a common vice.” Men must not sell above the maximum fixed by public authority, though they may sell below it, since it is fixed to protect the buyer; when there is no legal maximum, they must follow the market price and “the judgment of prudent and good men.” They must not take advantage of the necessities of individual buyers, must not overpraise their wares, must not sell them dearer merely because they have cost them much to get.337 Puritan utterances on the subject of enclosing were equally trenchant.338
Nor was such teaching merely the pious pedantry of the pulpit. It found some echo in contrite spirits; it left some imprint on the conduct of congregations. If D’Ewes was the unresisting victim of a more than ordinarily aggressive conscience, he was also a man of the world who played a not inconspicuous part in public affairs; and D’Ewes not only ascribed the fire which destroyed his father’s house to the judgment of Heaven on ill-gotten gains, but expressly prescribed in his will that, in order to avoid the taint of the accursed thing, provision should be made for his daughters, not by investing his capital at a fixed—and therefore usurious—rate of interest, but by the purchase either of land or of annuities.339 The classis which met at Dedham in the eighties of the sixteenth century was concerned partly with questions of ceremony, of church government, of the right use of Sunday, and with the weighty problems whether boys of sixteen might wear their hats in church, and by what marks one might detect a witch. But it discussed also what provision could be made to check vagrancy; advised the brethren to confine their dealings to “the godliest of that trade” (of cloth making); recommended the establishment in the township of a scheme of universal education, that of children of parents too poor to meet the cost being defrayed from collections made in church; and urged that each well-to-do householder should provide in his home for two (or, if less able, one) of his impoverished neighbors who “walke christianly and honestlie in their callinges.”340 In the ever-lengthening list of scandalous and notorious sins to be punished by exclusion from the sacrament, which was elaborated by the Westminster Assembly, a place was found, not only for drunkards, swearers, and blasphemers, worshippers and makers of images, senders or carriers of challenges, persons dancing, gaming, attending plays on the Lord’s day, or resorting to witches, wizards, and fortune-tellers, but for the more vulgar vices of those who fell into extortion, barratry and bribery.341 The classis of Bury in Lancashire (quantum mutatus!) took these economic lapses seriously. It decided in 1647, after considerable debate, that “usury is a scandalous sin, deserving suspention upon obstinacy.”342
It was a moment when good men were agog to cast the money-changers from the temple and to make straight the way of the Lord. “God hath honnored you in callinge you to a place of power and trust, and hee expects that you should bee faithfull to that trust. You are postinge to the grave every day; you dwell uppon the borders of eternity; your breath is in your nostrells; therfore duble and treble your resolutions to bee zealous in a good thinge. … How dreadfull will a dieinge bed bee to a negligent magistrate! What is the reward of a slothfull servant? Is it not to bee punished with everlastinge destruction from the presence of the Lord?”343 Such, in that singular age, was the language in which the mayor of Salisbury requested the justices of Wiltshire to close four public-houses. Apparently they closed them.
The attempt to crystallize social morality in an objective discipline was possible only in a theocracy; and, still eloquent in speech, theocracy had abdicated in fact, even before the sons of Belial returned to cut down its groves and lay waste its holy places. In an age when the right to dissent from the State Church was still not fully established, its defeat was fortunate, for it was the victory of tolerance. It meant, however, that the discipline of the Church gave place to the attempt to promote reform through the action of the State, which reached its height in the Barebones Parliament. Projects for law reform, marriage reform and financial reform, the reform of prisons and the relief of debtors, jostled each other on its committees; while outside it there were murmurs among radicals against social and economic privilege, which were not to be heard again till the days of the Chartists, and which to the conservative mind of Cromwell seemed to portend mere anarchy. The transition from the idea of a moral code enforced by the Church, which had been characteristic of early Calvinism, to the economic individualism of the later Puritan movement took place, in fact, by way of the democratic agitation of the Independents. Abhorring the whole mechanism of ecclesiastical discipline and compulsory conformity, they endeavored to achieve the same social and ethical ends by political action.
The change was momentous. If the English Social Democratic movement has any single source, that source is to be found in the New Model Army. But the conception implied in the attempt to formulate a scheme of economic ethics—the theory that every department of life falls beneath the same all-encompassing arch of religion—was too deeply rooted to be exorcised merely by political changes, or even by the more corroding march of economic development. Expelled from the world of fact, where it had always been a stranger and a sojourner, it survived in the world of ideas, and its champions in the last half of the century labored it the more, precisely because they knew that it must be conveyed to their audiences by teaching and preaching or not at all. Of those champions the most learned, the most practical, and the most persuasive was Richard Baxter.
How Baxter endeavored to give practical instruction to his congregation at Kidderminster, he himself has told us. “Every Thursday evening my neighbours that were most desirous and had opportunity met at my house, and there one of them repeated the sermon, and afterwards they proposed what doubts any of them had about the sermon, or any other case of conscience, and I resolved their doubts.”344 Both in form and in matter, his Christian Directory, or a Summ of Practical Theologie and Cases of Conscience345 is a remarkable book. It is, in essence, a Puritan Summa Theologica and Summa Moralis in one; its method of treatment descends directly from that of the medieval Summae, and it is, perhaps, the last important English specimen of a famous genus. Its object, as Baxter explains in his introduction, is “the resolving of practical cases of conscience, and the reducing of theoretical knowledge into serious Christian practice.” Divided into four parts, Ethics, Economics, Ecclesiastics, and Politics, it has as its purpose to establish the rules of a Christian casuistry, which may be sufficiently detailed and precise to afford practical guidance to the proper conduct of men in the different relations of life, as lawyer, physician, schoolmaster, soldier, master and servant, buyer and seller, landlord and tenant, lender and borrower, ruler and subject. Part of its material is derived from the treatment of similar questions by previous writers, both before and after the Reformation, and Baxter is conscious of continuing a great tradition. But it is, above all things, realistic, and its method lends plausibility to the suggestion that it originated in an attempt to answer practical questions put to its author by members of his congregation. Its aim is not to overwhelm by authority, but to convince by an appeal to the enlightened common sense of the Christian reader. It does not overlook, therefore, the practical facts of a world in which commerce is carried on by the East India Company in distant markets, trade is universally conducted on credit, the iron manufacture is a large-scale industry demanding abundant supplies of capital and offering a profitable opening to the judicious investor, and the relations of landlords and tenants have been thrown into confusion by the fire of London. Nor does it ignore the moral qualities for the cultivation of which an opportunity is offered by the life of business. It takes as its starting-point the commercial environment of the Restoration, and its teaching is designed for “Rome or London, not Fools’ Paradise.”
Baxter’s acceptance of the realities of his age makes the content of his teaching the more impressive. The attempt to formulate a casuistry of economic conduct obviously implies that economic relations are to be regarded merely as one department of human behavior, for which each man is morally responsible, not as the result of an impersonal mechanism, to which ethical judgments are irrelevant. Baxter declines, therefore, to admit the convenient dualism, which exonerates the individual by representing his actions as the outcome of uncontrollable forces. The Christian, he insists, is committed by his faith to the acceptance of certain ethical standards, and these standards are as obligatory in the sphere of economic transactions as in any other province of human activity. To the conventional objection that religion has nothing to do with business—that “every man will get as much as he can have and that caveat emptor is the only security”—he answers bluntly that this way of dealing does not hold among Christians. Whatever the laxity of the law, the Christian is bound to consider first the golden rule and the public good. Naturally, therefore, he is debarred from making money at the expense of other persons, and certain profitable avenues of commerce are closed to him at the outset. “It is not lawful to take up or keep up any oppressing monopoly or trade, which tends to enrich you by the loss of the Commonwealth or of many.”
But the Christian must not only eschew the obvious extortion practiced by the monopolist, the engrosser, the organizer of a corner or a combine. He must carry on his business in the spirit of one who is conducting a public service; he must order it for the advantage of his neighbor as much as, and, if his neighbor be poor, more than, for his own. He must not desire “to get another’s goods or labour for less than it is worth.” He must not secure a good price for his own wares “by extortion working upon men’s ignorance, error, or necessity.” When prices are fixed by law, he must strictly observe the legal maximum; when they are not, he must follow the price fixed by common estimation. If he finds a buyer who is willing to give more, he “must not make too great an advantage of his convenience or desire, but be glad that [he] can pleasure him upon equal, fair, and honest terms,” for “it is a false rule of them that think their commodity is worth as much as anyone will give.” If the seller foresees that in the future prices are likely to fall, he must not make profit out of his neighbour’s ignorance, but must tell him so. If he foresees that they will rise, he may hold his wares back, but only—a somewhat embarrassing exception—if it be not “to the hurt of the Commonwealth, as if … keeping it in be the cause of the dearth, and … bringing it forth would help to prevent it.” If he is buying from the poor, “charity must be exercised as well as justice”; the buyer must pay the full price that the goods are worth to himself, and, rather than let the seller suffer because he cannot stand out for his price, should offer him a loan or persuade someone else to do so. In no case may a man doctor his wares in order to get for them a higher price than they are really worth, and in no case may he conceal any defects of quality; if he was so unlucky as to have bought an inferior article, he “may not repair [his] loss by doing as [he] was done by, … no more than [he] may cut another’s purse because [his] was cut.” Rivalry in trade, Baxter thinks, is inevitable. But the Christian must not snatch a good bargain “out of greedy covetousness, nor to the injury of the poor … nor … so as to disturb that due and civil order which should be among moderate men in trading.” On the contrary, if “a covetous oppressor” offer a poor man less than his goods are worth, “it may be a duty to offer the poor man the worth of his commodity and save him from the oppressor.”
The principles which should determine the contract between buyer and seller are applied equally to all other economic relations. Usury, in the sense of payment for a loan, is not in itself unlawful for Christians. But it becomes so, when the lender does not allow the borrower “such a proportion of the gain as his labour, hazard, or poverty doth require, but … will live at ease upon his labours”; or when, in spite of the borrower’s misfortune, he rigorously exacts his pound of flesh; or when interest is demanded for a loan which charity would require to be free. Masters must discipline their servants for their good; but it is “an odious oppression and injustice to defraud a servant or labourer of his wages, yea, or to give him less than he deserveth.” As the descendant of a family of yeomen, “free,” as he says, “from the temptations of poverty and riches,”346 Baxter had naturally strong views as to the ethics of landowning. Significantly enough, he deals with them under the general rubric of “Cases of oppression, especially of tenants,” oppression being defined as the “injuring of inferiors who are unable to resist or to right themselves.” “It is too common a sort of oppression for the rich in all places to domineer too insolently over the poor, and force them to follow their wills and to serve their interest, be it right or wrong. … Especially unmerciful landlords are the common and sore oppressors of the countrymen. If a few men can but get money enough to purchase all the land in a county, they think that they may do with their own as they list, and set such hard bargains of it to their tenants, that they are all but as their servants. … An oppressor is an Antichrist and an Anti-God … not only the agent of the Devil, but his image.” As in his discussion of prices, the gist of Baxter’s analysis of the cases of conscience which arise in the relations of landlord and tenant is that no man may secure pecuniary gain for himself by injuring his neighbor. Except in unusual circumstances, a landlord must not let his land at the full competitive rent which it would fetch in the market: “Ordinarily the common sort of tenants in England should have so much abated of the fullest worth that they may comfortably live on it, and follow their labours with cheerfulness of mind and liberty to serve God in their families, and to mind the matters of their salvation, and not to be necessitated to such toil and care and pinching want as shall make them liker slaves than free men.” He must not improve (i.e., enclose) his land without considering the effect on the tenants, or evict his tenants without compensating them, and in such a way as to cause depopulation; nor must a newcomer take a holding over the sitting tenant’s head by offering “a greater rent than he can give or than the landlord hath just cause to require of him.” The Christian, in short, while eschewing “causeless, perplexing, melancholy scruples, which would stop a man in the course of his duty,” must so manage his business as to “avoid sin rather than loss,” and seek first to keep his conscience in peace.
The first characteristic to strike the modern reader in all this teaching is its conservatism. In spite of the economic and political revolutions of the past two centuries, how small, after all, the change in the presentation of the social ethics of the Christian faith! A few months after the appearance of the Christian Directory, the Stop of the Exchequer tore a hole in the already intricate web of London finance, and sent a shiver through the money-markets of Europe. But Baxter, though no mere antiquarian, discourses of equity in bargaining, of just prices, of reasonable rents, of the sin of usury, in the same tone, if not with quite the same conclusions, as a medieval Schoolman, and he differs from one of the later Doctors, like St. Antonino, hardly more than St. Antonino himself had differed from Aquinas. Seven years later Bunyan published The Life and Death of Mr. Badman. Among the vices which it pilloried were the sin of extortion, “most commonly committed by men of trade, who without all conscience, when they have an advantage, will make a prey of their neighbour,” the covetousness of “hucksters, that buy up the poor man’s victual wholesale and sell it to him again for unreasonable gains,” the avarice of usurers, who watch till “the poor fall into their mouths,” and “of those vile wretches called pawnbrokers, that lend money and goods to poor people, who are by necessity forced to such an inconvenience, and will make by one trick or another the interest of what they so lend amount to thirty and forty, yea, sometimes fifty pounds by the year.” As Christian and Christiana watched Mr. Badman thus bite and pinch the poor in his shop in Bedford, before they took staff and scrip for their journey to a more distant City, they remembered that the Lord himself will plead the cause of the afflicted against them that oppress them, and reflected, taught by the dealings of Ephron the son of Zohar, and of David with Ormon the Jebusite, that there is a “wickedness, as in selling too dear, so in buying too cheap.”347 Brother Berthold of Regensburg had said the same four centuries before in his racy sermons in Germany. The emergence of the idea that “business is business,” and that the world of commercial transactions is a closed compartment with laws of its own, if more ancient than is often supposed, did not win so painless a triumph as is sometimes suggested. Puritan as well as Catholic accepted without demur the view which set all human interests and activities within the compass of religion. Puritans, as well as Catholics, essayed the formidable task of formulating a Christian casuistry of economic conduct.
They essayed it. But they succeeded even less than the Popes and Doctors whose teaching, not always unwittingly, they repeated. And their failure had its roots, not merely in the obstacles offered by the ever more recalcitrant opposition of a commercial environment, but, like all failures which are significant, in the soul of Puritanism itself. Virtues are often conquered by vices, but their rout is most complete when it is inflicted by other virtues, more militant, more efficient, or more congenial, and it is not only tares which choke the ground where the good seed is sown. The fundamental question, after all, is not what kind of rules a faith enjoins, but what type of character it esteems and cultivates. To the scheme of Christian ethics which offered admonitions against the numberless disguises assumed by the sin which sticketh fast between buying and selling, the Puritan character offered, not direct opposition, but a polished surface on which these ghostly admonitions could find no enduring foothold. The rules of Christian morality elaborated by Baxter were subtle and sincere. But they were like seeds carried by birds from a distant and fertile plain, and dropped upon a glacier. They were at once embalmed and sterilized in a river of ice.
“The capitalist spirit” is as old as history, and was not, as has sometimes been said, the offspring of Puritanism. But it found in certain aspects of later Puritanism a tonic which braced its energies and fortified its already vigorous temper. At first sight, no contrast could be more violent than that between the iron collectivism, the almost military discipline, the remorseless and violent rigors practiced in Calvin’s Geneva, and preached elsewhere, if in a milder form, by his disciples, and the impatient rejection of all traditional restrictions on economic enterprise which was the temper of the English business world after the Civil War. In reality, the same ingredients were present throughout, but they were mixed in changing proportions, and exposed to different temperatures at different times. Like traits of individual character which are suppressed till the approach of maturity releases them, the tendencies in Puritanism, which were to make it later a potent ally of the movement against the control of economic relations in the name either of social morality or of the public interest, did not reveal themselves till political and economic changes had prepared a congenial environment for their growth. Nor, once those conditions were created, was it only England which witnessed the transformation. In all countries alike, in Holland, in America, in Scotland, in Geneva itself, the social theory of Calvinism went through the same process of development. It had begun by being the very soul of authoritarian regimentation. It ended by being the vehicle of an almost Utilitarian individualism. While social reformers in the sixteenth century could praise Calvin for his economic rigor, their successors in Restoration England, if of one persuasion, denounced him as the parent of economic license, if of another, applauded Calvinist communities for their commercial enterprise and for their freedom from antiquated prejudices on the subject of economic morality. So little do those who shoot the arrows of the spirit know where they will light.
III
The Triumph of Economic Virtues
“One beam in a dark place,” wrote one who knew the travail of the spirit, “hath exceeding much refreshment in it. Blessed be His name for shining upon so dark a heart as mine.”348 While the revelation of God to the individual soul is the center of all religion, the essence of Puritan theology was that it made it, not only the center, but the whole circumference and substance, dismissing as dross and vanity all else but this secret and solitary communion. Grace alone can save, and this grace is the direct gift of God, unmediated by any earthly institution. The elect cannot by any act of their own evoke it; but they can prepare their hearts to receive it, and cherish it when received. They will prepare them best, if they empty them of all that may disturb the intentness of their lonely vigil. Like an engineer, who, to canalize the rush of the oncoming tide, dams all channels save that through which it is to pour, like a painter who makes light visible by plunging all that is not light in gloom, the Puritan attunes his heart to the voice from Heaven by an immense effort of concentration and abnegation. To win all, he renounces all. When earthly props have been cast down, the soul stands erect in the presence of God. Infinity is attained by a process of subtraction.
To a vision thus absorbed in a single intense experience, not only religious and ecclesiastical systems, but the entire world of human relations, the whole fabric of social institutions, witnessing in all the wealth of their idealism and their greed to the infinite creativeness of man, reveal themselves in a new and wintry light. The fire of the spirit burns brightly on the hearth; but through the windows of his soul the Puritan, unless a poet or a saint, looks on a landscape touched by no breath of spring. What he sees is a forbidding and frost-bound wilderness, rolling its snow-clad leagues towards the grave—a wilderness to be subdued with aching limbs beneath solitary stars. Through it he must take his way, alone. No aid can avail him: no preacher, for only the elect can apprehend with the spirit the word of God; no Church, for to the visible Church even reprobates belong; no sacrament, for sacraments are ordained to increase the glory of God, not to minister spiritual nourishment to man; hardly God himself, for Christ died for the elect, and it may well be that the majesty of the Creator is revealed by the eternal damnation of all but a remnant of the created.349
His life is that of a soldier in hostile territory. He suffers in spirit the perils which the first settlers in America endured in body, the sea behind, the untamed desert in front, a cloud of inhuman enemies on either hand. Where Catholic and Anglican had caught a glimpse of the invisible, hovering like a consecration over the gross world of sense, and touching its muddy vesture with the unearthly gleam of a divine, yet familiar, beauty, the Puritan mourned for a lost Paradise and a creation sunk in sin. Where they had seen society as a mystical body, compact of members varying in order and degree, but dignified by participation in the common life of Christendom, he saw a bleak antithesis between the spirit which quickeneth and an alien, indifferent or hostile world. Where they had reverenced the decent order whereby past was knit to present, and man to man, and man to God, through fellowship in works of charity, in festival and fast, in the prayers and ceremonies of the Church, he turned with horror from the filthy rags of human righteousness. Where they, in short, had found comfort in a sacrament, he started back from a snare set to entrap his soul.
We receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does Nature live.
Too often, contemning the external order as unspiritual, he made it, and ultimately himself, less spiritual by reason of his contempt.
Those who seek God in isolation from their fellowmen, unless trebly armed for the perils of the quest, are apt to find, not God, but a devil, whose countenance bears an embarrassing resemblance to their own. The moral self-sufficiency of the Puritan nerved his will, but it corroded his sense of social solidarity. For, if each individual’s destiny hangs on a private transaction between himself and his Maker, what room is left for human intervention? A servant of Jehovah more than of Christ, he revered God as a Judge rather than loved him as a Father, and was moved less by compassion for his erring brethren than by impatient indignation at the blindness of vessels of wrath who “sinned their mercies.” A spiritual aristocrat, who sacrificed fraternity to liberty, he drew from his idealization of personal responsibility a theory of individual rights, which, secularized and generalized, was to be among the most potent explosives that the world has known. He drew from it also a scale of ethical values, in which the traditional scheme of Christian virtues was almost exactly reversed, and which, since he was above all things practical, he carried as a dynamic into the routine of business and political life.
For, since conduct and action, though availing nothing to attain the free gift of salvation, are a proof that the gift has been accorded, what is rejected as a means is resumed as a consequence, and the Puritan flings himself into practical activities with the daemonic energy of one who, all doubts allayed, is conscious that he is a sealed and chosen vessel. Once engaged in affairs, he brings to them both the qualities and limitations of his creed in all their remorseless logic. Called by God to labor in his vineyard, he has within himself a principle at once of energy and of order, which makes him irresistible both in war and in the struggles of commerce. Convinced that character is all and circumstances nothing, he sees in the poverty of those who fall by the way, not a misfortune to be pitied and relieved, but a moral failing to be condemned, and in riches, not an object of suspicion—though like other gifts they may be abused—but the blessing which rewards the triumph of energy and will. Tempered by self-examination, self-discipline, self-control, he is the practical ascetic, whose victories are won not in the cloister, but on the battlefield, in the countinghouse, and in the market.
This temper, of course with infinite varieties of quality and emphasis, found its social organ in those middle and commercial classes who were the citadel of the Puritan spirit, and whom, “ennobled by their own industry and virtue,”350 Milton described as the standard-bearers of progress and enlightenment. We are so accustomed to think of England as par excellence the pioneer of economic progress, that we are apt to forget how recently that role has been assumed. In the Middle Ages it belonged to the Italians, in the sixteenth century to the Netherland dominions of the Spanish Empire, in the seventeenth to the United Provinces and, above all, to the Dutch.
The England of Shakespeare and Bacon was still largely medieval in its economic organization and social outlook, more interested in maintaining customary standards of consumption than in accumulating capital for future production, with an aristocracy contemptuous of the economic virtues, a peasantry farming for subsistence amid the organized confusion of the open-field village, and a small, if growing, body of jealously conservative craftsmen. In such a society Puritanism worked like the yeast which sets the whole mass fermenting. It went through its slack and loosely knit texture like a troop of Cromwell’s Ironsides through the disorderly cavalry of Rupert. Where, as in Ireland, the elements were so alien that assimilation was out of the question, the result was a wound that festered for three centuries. In England the effect was that at once of an irritant and of a tonic. Puritanism had its own standards of social conduct, derived partly from the obvious interests of the commercial classes, partly from its conception of the nature of God and the destiny of man. These standards were in sharp antithesis, both to the considerable surviving elements of feudalism in English society, and to the policy of the authoritarian State, with its ideal of an ordered and graded society, whose different members were to be maintained in their traditional status by the pressure and protection of a paternal monarchy. Sapping the former by its influence and overthrowing the latter by direct attack, Puritanism became a potent force in preparing the way for the commercial civilization which finally triumphed at the Revolution.
The complaint that religious radicalism, which aimed at upsetting the government of the Church, went hand in hand with an economic radicalism, which resented the restraints on individual self-interest imposed in the name of religion or of social policy, was being made by the stricter school of religious opinion quite early in the reign of Elizabeth.351 Seventeenth-century writers repeated the charge that the Puritan conscience lost its delicacy where matters of business were concerned, and some of them were sufficiently struck by the phenomenon to attempt an historical explanation of it. The example on which they usually seized—the symbol of a supposed general disposition to laxity—was the indulgence shown by Puritan divines in the particular matter of moderate interest. It was the effect, so the picturesque story ran,352 of the Marian persecution. The refugees who fled to the Continent could not start business in a foreign country. If, driven by necessity, they invested their capital and lived on the proceeds, who could quarrel with so venial a lapse in so good a cause? Subsequent writers embellished the picture. The redistribution of property at the time of the Dissolution, and the expansion of trade in the middle of the century, had led, one of them argued, to a great increase in the volume of credit transactions. The opprobrium which attached to loans at interest—“a sly and forbid practice”—not only among Romanists and Anglicans, but among honest Puritans, played into the hands of the less scrupulous members of “the faction.” Disappointed in politics, they took to money-lending, and, without venturing to justify usury in theory, defended it in practice. “Without the scandal of a recantation, they contrived an expedient, by maintaining that, though usury for the name were stark naught, yet for widows, orphans and other impotents (therein principally comprising the saints under persecution) it was very tolerable, because profitable, and in a manner necessary.” Naturally, Calvin’s doctrine as to the legitimacy of moderate interest was hailed by these hypocrites with a shout of glee. “It took with the brethren like polygamy with the Turks, recommended by the example of divers zealous ministers, who themselves desired to pass for orphans of the first rank.”353 Nor was it only as the apologist of moderate interest that Puritanism was alleged to reveal the cloven hoof. Puritans themselves complained of a mercilessness in driving hard bargains, and of a harshness to the poor, which contrasted unfavorably with the practice of followers of the unreformed religion. “The Papists,” wrote a Puritan in 1653, “may rise up against many of this generation. It is a sad thing that they should be more forward upon a bad principle than a Christian upon a good one.”354
Such, in all ages, is history as seen by the political pamphleteer. The real story was less dramatic, but more significant. From the very beginning, Calvinism had comprised two elements, which Calvin himself had fused, but which contained the seeds of future discord. It had at once given a wholehearted imprimatur to the life of business enterprise, which most earlier moralists had regarded with suspicion, and had laid upon it the restraining hand of an inquisitorial discipline. At Geneva, where Calvinism was the creed of a small and homogeneous city, the second aspect had predominated; in the many-sided life of England, where there were numerous conflicting interests to balance it, and where it was long politically weak, the first. Then, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had come the wave of commercial and financial expansion—companies, colonies, capitalism in textiles, capitalism in mining, capitalism in finance—on the crest of which the English commercial classes, in Calvin’s day still held in leading-strings by conservative statesmen, had climbed to a position of dignity and affluence.
Naturally, as the Puritan movement came to its own, these two elements flew apart. The collectivist, half-communistic aspect, which had never been acclimatized in England, quietly dropped out of notice, to crop up once more, and for the last time, to the disgust and terror of merchant and landowner, in the popular agitation under the Commonwealth. The individualism congenial to the world of business became the distinctive characteristic of a Puritanism which had arrived, and which, in becoming a political force, was at once secularized and committed to a career of compromise. Its note was not the attempt to establish on earth a “Kingdom of Christ,” but an ideal of personal character and conduct, to be realized by the punctual discharge both of public and private duties. Its theory had been discipline; its practical result was liberty.
Given the social and political conditions of England, the transformation was inevitable. The incompatibility of Presbyterianism with the stratified arrangement of English society had been remarked by Hooker.355 If the City Fathers of Geneva had thrown off by the beginning of the seventeenth century the religious collectivism of Calvin’s regime, it was not to be expected that the landowners and bourgeoisie of an aristocratic and increasingly commercial nation, however much Calvinist theology might appeal to them, would view with favor the social doctrines implied in Calvinist discipline. In the reign of the first two Stuarts, both economic interests and political theory pulled them hard in the opposite direction. “Merchants’ doings,” the man of business in Wilson’s Discourse Upon Usury had observed, “must not thus be overthwarted by preachers and others that cannot skill of their dealings.”356 Behind the elaborate façade of Tudor State control, which has attracted the attention of historians, an individualist movement had been steadily developing, which found expression in opposition to the traditional policy of stereotyping economic relations by checking enclosure, controlling food supplies and prices, interfering with the money-market, and regulating the conditions of the wage contract and of apprenticeship. In the first forty years of the seventeenth century, on grounds both of expediency and of principle, the commercial and propertied classes were becoming increasingly restive under the whole system, at once ambitious and inefficient, of economic paternalism. It was in the same sections of the community that both religious and economic dissatisfaction were most acute. Puritanism, with its idealization of the spiritual energies which found expression in the activities of business and industry, drew the isolated rivulets of discontent together, and swept them forward with the dignity and momentum of a religious and a social philosophy.
For it was not merely as the exponent of certain tenets as to theology and church government, but as the champion of interests and opinions embracing every side of the life of society, that the Puritan movement came into collision with the Crown. In reality, as is the case with most heroic ideologies, the social and religious aspects of Puritanism were not disentangled; they presented themselves, both to supporters and opponents, as different facets of a single scheme. “All that crossed the views of the needy courtiers, the proud encroaching priests, the thievish projectors, the lewd nobility and gentry … whoever could endure a sermon, modest habit or conversation, or anything good—all these were Puritans.”357 The clash was not one of theories—a systematic and theoretical individualism did not develop till after the Restoration—but of contradictory economic interests and incompatible conceptions of social expediency.
The economic policy haltingly pursued by the Government of Charles I bore some resemblance to the system of which a more uncompromising version was developed between 1661 and 1685 by Colbert in France. It was one which favored an artificial and State-promoted capitalism—a capitalism resting on the grant of privileges and concessions to company promoters who would pay for them, and accompanied by an elaborate system of State control, which again, if partly inspired by a genuine solicitude for the public interest, was too often smeared with an odious trail of finance. It found its characteristic expression in the grant of patents, in the revival of the royal monopoly of exchange business, against which the City had fought under Elizabeth, in attempts to enforce by administrative action compliance with the elaborate and impracticable code controlling the textile trades and to put down speculation in foodstuffs, and in raids on enclosing landlords, on employers who paid in truck or evaded the rates fixed by assessment, and on justices who were negligent in the administration of the Poor Laws. Such measures were combined with occasional plunges into even more grandiose schemes for the establishment of county granaries, for taking certain industries into the hands of the Crown, and even for the virtual nationalization of the cloth manufacture.358
“The very genius of that nation of people,” wrote Strafford to Laud of the Puritans, “leads them always to oppose, as well civilly as ecclesiastically, all that ever authority ordains for them.”359 Against this whole attempt to convert economic activity into an instrument of profit for the Government and its hangers-on—against, no less, the spasmodic attempts of the State to protect peasants against landlords, craftsmen against merchants, and consumers against middlemen—the interests which it thwarted and curbed revolted with increasing pertinacity. Questions of taxation, on which attention has usually been concentrated, were in reality merely one element in a quarrel which had its deeper cause in the collision of incompatible social philosophies. The Puritan tradesman had seen his business ruined by a monopoly granted to a needy courtier, and cursed Laud and his Popish soap. The Puritan goldsmith or financier had found his trade as a bullion-broker hampered by the reestablishment of the ancient office of Royal Exchanger, and secured a resolution from the House of Commons, declaring that the patent vesting it in Lord Holland and the proclamation forbidding the exchanging of gold and silver by unauthorized persons were a grievance. The Puritan moneylender had been punished by the Court of High Commission, and railed at the interference of bishops in temporal affairs. The Puritan clothier, who had suffered many things at the hands of interfering busybodies despatched from Whitehall to teach him his business, averted discreet eyes when the Wiltshire workmen threw a more than usually obnoxious Royal Commissioner into the Avon, and, when the Civil War came, rallied to the Parliament. The Puritan country gentleman had been harried by Depopulation Commissions, and took his revenge with the meeting of the Long Parliament. The Puritan merchant had seen the Crown both squeeze money out of his company, and threaten its monopoly by encouraging courtly interlopers to infringe its charter. The Puritan member of Parliament had invested in colonial enterprises, and had ideas as to commercial policy which were not those of the Government. Confident in their own energy and acumen, proud of their success, and regarding with profound distrust the interference both of Church and of State with matters of business and property rights, the commercial classes, in spite of their attachment to a militant mercantilism in matters of trade, were, even before the Civil War, more than half converted to the administrative nihilism which was to be the rule of social policy in the century following it. Their demand was the one which is usual in such circumstances. It was that business affairs should be left to be settled by business men, unhampered by the intrusions of an antiquated morality or by misconceived arguments of public policy.360
The separation of economic from ethical interests, which was the note of all this movement, was in sharp opposition to religious tradition, and it did not establish itself without a struggle. Even in the very capital of European commerce and finance, an embittered controversy was occasioned by the refusal to admit usurers to communion or to confer degrees upon them; it was only after a storm of pamphleteering, in which the theological faculty of the University of Utrecht performed prodigies of zeal and ingenuity, that the States of Holland and West Friesland closed the agitation by declaring that the Church had no concern with questions of banking.361 In the French Calvinist Churches, the decline of discipline had caused lamentations a generation earlier.362 In America, the theocracy of Massachusetts, merciless alike to religious liberty and to economic license, was about to be undermined by the rise of new States like Rhode Island and Pennsylvania, whose tolerant, individualist and utilitarian temper was destined to find its greatest representative in the golden common sense of Benjamin Franklin.363 “The sin of our too great fondness for trade, to the neglecting of our more valuable interests,” wrote a Scottish divine in 1709, when Glasgow was on the eve of a triumphant outburst of commercial enterprise, “I humbly think will be written upon our judgment. … I am sure the Lord is remarkably frowning upon our trade … since it was put in the room of religion.”364
In England, the growing disposition to apply exclusively economic standards to social relations evoked from Puritan writers and divines vigorous protests against usurious interest, extortionate prices and the oppression of tenants by landlords. The faithful, it was urged, had interpreted only too literally the doctrine that the sinner was saved, not by works, but by faith. Usury, “in time of Popery an odious thing,”365 had become a scandal. Professors, by their covetousness, caused the enemies of the reformed religion to blaspheme.366 The exactions of the forestaller and regrater were never so monstrous or so immune from interference. The hearts of the rich were never so hard, nor the necessities of the poor so neglected. “The poor able to work are suffered to beg; the impotent, aged and sick are not sufficiently provided for, but almost starved with the allowance of 3d. and 4d. a piece a week. … These are the last times indeed. Men generally are all for themselves. And some would set up such, having a form of religion, without the power of it.”367
These utterances came, however, from that part of the Puritan mind which looked backward. That which looked forward found in the rapidly growing spirit of economic enterprise something not uncongenial to its own temper, and went out to welcome it as an ally. What in Calvin had been a qualified concession to practical exigencies appeared in some of his later followers as a frank idealization of the life of the trader, as the service of God and the training-ground of the soul. Discarding the suspicion of economic motives, which had been as characteristic of the reformers as of medieval theologians, Puritanism in its later phases added a halo of ethical sanctification to the appeal of economic expediency, and offered a moral creed, in which the duties of religion and the calls of business ended their long estrangement in an unanticipated reconciliation. Its spokesmen pointed out, it is true, the peril to the soul involved in a single-minded concentration on economic interests. The enemy, however, was not riches, but the bad habits sometimes associated with them, and its warnings against an excessive preoccupation with the pursuit of gain wore more and more the air of afterthoughts, appended to teaching the main tendency and emphasis of which were little affected by these incidental qualifications. It insisted, in short, that moneymaking, if not free from spiritual dangers, was not a danger and nothing else, but that it could be, and ought to be, carried on for the greater glory of God.
The conception to which it appealed to bridge the gulf sprang from the very heart of Puritan theology. It was that expressed in the characteristic and oft-used phrase, “a Calling.”368 The rational order of the universe is the work of God, and its plan requires that the individual should labor for God’s glory. There is a spiritual calling, and a temporal calling. It is the first duty of the Christian to know and believe in God; it is by faith that he will be saved. But faith is not a mere profession, such as that of Talkative of Prating Row, whose “religion is to make a noise.” The only genuine faith is the faith which produces works. “At the day of Doom men shall be judged according to their fruits. It will not be said then, Did you believe? but, Were you doers, or talkers only?”369 The second duty of the Christian is to labor in the affairs of practical life, and this second duty is subordinate only to the first. “God,” wrote a Puritan divine, “doth call every man and woman … to serve him in some peculiar employment in this world, both for their own and the common good. … The Great Governour of the world hath appointed to every man his proper post and province, and let him be never so active out of his sphere, he will be at a great loss, if he do not keep his own vineyard and mind his own business.”370
From this reiterated insistence on secular obligations as imposed by the divine will, it follows that, not withdrawal from the world, but the conscientious discharge of the duties of business, is among the loftiest of religious and moral virtues. “The begging friars and such monks as live only to themselves and to their formal devotion, but do employ themselves in no one thing to further their own subsistence or the good of mankind … yet have the confidence to boast of this their course as a state of perfection; which in very deed, as to the worthiness of it, falls short of the poorest cobbler, for his is a calling of God, and theirs is none.”371 The idea was not a new one. Luther had advanced it as a weapon against monasticism. But for Luther, with his patriarchal outlook on economic affairs, the calling means normally that state of life in which the individual has been set by Heaven, and against which it is impiety to rebel. On the lips of Puritan divines, it is not an invitation to resignation, but the bugle-call which summons the elect to the long battle which will end only with their death. “The world is all before them.” They are to hammer out their salvation, not merely in vocatione, but per vocationem. The calling is not a condition in which the individual is born, but a strenuous and exacting enterprise, to be undertaken, indeed, under the guidance of Providence, but to be chosen by each man for himself, with a deep sense of his solemn responsibilities. “God hath given to man reason for this use, that he should first consider, then choose, then put in execution; and it is a preposterous and brutish thing to fix or fall upon any weighty business, such as a calling or condition of life, without a careful pondering it in the balance of sound reason.”372
Laborare est orare. By the Puritan moralist the ancient maxim is repeated with a new and intenser significance. The labor which he idealizes is not simply a requirement imposed by nature, or a punishment for the sin of Adam. It is itself a kind of ascetic discipline, more rigorous than that demanded of any order of mendicants—a discipline imposed by the will of God, and to be undergone, not in solitude, but in the punctual discharge of secular duties. It is not merely an economic means, to be laid aside when physical needs have been satisfied. It is a spiritual end, for in it alone can the soul find health, and it must be continued as an ethical duty long after it has ceased to be a material necessity. Work thus conceived stands at the very opposite pole from “good works,” as they were understood, or misunderstood, by Protestants. They, it was thought, had been a series of single transactions, performed as compensation for particular sins, or out of anxiety to acquire merit. What is required of the Puritan is not individual meritorious acts, but a holy life—a system in which every element is grouped round a central idea, the service of God, from which all disturbing irrelevances have been pruned, and to which all minor interests are subordinated.
His conception of that life was expressed in the words, “Be wholly taken up in diligent business of your lawful callings, when you are not exercised in the more immediate service of God.”373 In order to deepen his spiritual life, the Christian must be prepared to narrow it. He “is blind in no man’s cause, but best sighted in his own. He confines himself to the circle of his own affairs and thrusts not his fingers in needless fires. … He sees the falseness of it [the world] and therefore learns to trust himself ever, others so far as not to be damaged by their disappointment.”374 There must be no idle leisure: “those that are prodigal of their time despise their own souls.”375 Religion must be active, not merely contemplative. Contemplation is, indeed, a kind of self-indulgence. “To neglect this [i.e., bodily employment and mental labor] and say, ‘I will pray and meditate,’ is as if your servant should refuse your greatest work, and tye himself to some lesser, easie part. … God hath commanded you some way or other to labour for your daily bread.”376 The rich are no more excused from work than the poor, though they may rightly use their riches to select some occupation specially serviceable to others. Covetousness is a danger to the soul, but it is not so grave a danger as sloth. “The standing pool is prone to putrefaction: and it were better to beat down the body and to keep it in subjection by a laborious calling, than through luxury to become a castaway.”377 So far from poverty being meritorious, it is a duty to choose the more profitable occupation. “If God show you a way in which you may lawfully get more than in another way (without wrong to your soul or to any other), if you refuse this, and choose the less gainful way, you cross one of the ends of your Calling, and you refuse to be God’s steward.” Luxury, unrestrained pleasure, personal extravagance, can have no place in a Christian’s conduct, for “every penny which is laid out … must be done as by God’s own appointment.” Even excessive devotion to friends and relations is to be avoided. “It is an irrational act, and therefore not fit for a rational creature, to love anyone farther than reason will allow us. … It very often taketh up men’s minds so as to hinder their love to God.”378 The Christian life, in short, must be systematic and organized, the work of an iron will and a cool intelligence. Those who have read Mill’s account of his father must have been struck by the extent to which Utilitarianism was not merely a political doctrine, but a moral attitude. Some of the links in the Utilitarian coat of mail were forged, it may be suggested, by the Puritan divines of the seventeenth century.
The practical application of these generalities to business is set out in the numerous works composed to expound the rules of Christian conduct in the varied relations of life. If one may judge by their titles—Navigation Spiritualized, Husbandry Spiritualized, The Religious Weaver379—there must have been a considerable demand for books conducive to professional edification. A characteristic specimen is The Tradesman’s Calling,380 by Richard Steele. The author, after being deprived of a country living under the Act of Uniformity, spent his declining years as minister of a congregation at Armourers Hall in London, and may be presumed to have understood the spiritual requirements of the City in his day, when the heroic age of Puritanism was almost over and enthusiasm was no longer a virtue. No one who was writing a treatise on economic ethics today would address himself primarily to the independent shopkeeper, as the figure most representative of the business community, and Steele’s book throws a flood of light on the problems and outlook of the bourgeoisie, in an age before the center of economic gravity had shifted from the substantial tradesman to the exporting merchant, the industrial capitalist and the financier.
Like Baxter, he is acquainted with the teaching of earlier authorities as to equity in bargaining. He is doubtful, however, of its practical utility. Obvious frauds in matters of quality and weight are to be avoided; an honest tradesman ought not to corner the market, or “accumulate two or three callings merely to increase his riches,” or oppress the poor; nor should he seek more than “a reasonable proportion of gain,” or “lie on the catch to make [his] markets of others’ straits.” But Steele rejects as useless in practice the various objective standards of a reasonable profit—cost of production, standard of life, customary prices—which had been suggested in earlier ages, and concludes that the individual must judge for himself. “Here, as in many other cases, an upright conscience must be the clerk of the market.”
In reality, however, the characteristic of The Tradesman’s Calling, as of the age in which it was written, is not the relics of medieval doctrine which linger embalmed in its guileless pages, but the robust common sense, which carries the author lightly over traditional scruples on a tide of genial, if Philistine, optimism. For his main thesis is a comfortable one—that there is no necessary conflict between religion and business. “Prudence and Piety were always very good friends. … You may gain enough of both worlds if you would mind each in its place.” His object is to show how that agreeable result may be produced by dedicating business—with due reservations—to the service of God, and he has naturally little to say on the moral casuistry of economic conduct, because he is permeated by the idea that trade itself is a kind of religion. A tradesman’s first duty is to get a full insight into his calling, and to use his brains to improve it. “He that hath lent you talents hath also said, ‘Occupy till I come!’ Your strength is a talent, your parts are talents, and so is your time. How is it that ye stand all the day idle? … Your trade is your proper province. … Your own vineyard you should keep. … Your fancies, your understandings, your memories … are all to be laid out therein.” So far from their being an inevitable collision between the requirements of business and the claims of religion, they walk hand in hand. By a fortunate dispensation, the virtues enjoined on Christians—diligence, moderation, sobriety, thrift—are the very qualities most conducive to commercial success. The foundation of all is prudence; and prudence is merely another name for the “godly wisdom [which] comes in and puts due bounds” to his expenses, “and teaches the tradesman to live rather somewhat below than at all above his income.” Industry comes next, and industry is at once expedient and meritorious. It will keep the tradesman from “frequent and needless frequenting of taverns,” and pin him to his shop, “where you may most confidently expect the presence and blessing of God.”
If virtue is advantageous, vice is ruinous. Bad company, speculation, gambling, politics, and “a preposterous zeal” in religion—it is these things which are the ruin of tradesmen. Not, indeed, that religion is to be neglected. On the contrary, it “is to be exercised in the frequent use of holy ejaculations.” What is deprecated is merely the unbusinesslike habit of “neglecting a man’s necessary affairs upon pretence of religious worship.” But these faults, common and uncommon alike, are precisely those to be avoided by the sincere Christian, who must not, indeed, deceive or oppress his neighbor, but need not fly to the other extreme, be righteous overmuch, or refuse to “take the advantage which the Providence of God puts into his hands.” By a kind of happy, preestablished harmony, such as a later age discovered between the needs of society and the self-interest of the individual, success in business is in itself almost a sign of spiritual grace, for it is a proof that a man has labored faithfully in his vocation, and that “God has blessed his trade.” “Nothing will pass in any man’s account except it be done in the way of his calling. … Next to the saving his soul, [the tradesman’s] care and business is to serve God in his calling, and to drive it as far as it will go.”
When duty was so profitable, might not profit-making be a duty? Thus argued the honest pupils of Mr. Gripeman, the schoolmaster of Love-gain, a market-town in the county of Coveting in the north.381 The inference was illogical, but how attractive! When the Rev. David Jones was so indiscreet as to preach at St. Mary Woolnoth in Lombard Street a sermon against usury on the text, “The Pharisees who were covetous heard all these things and they derided Christ,” his career in London was brought to an abrupt conclusion.382
The springs of economic conduct lie in regions rarely penetrated by moralists, and to suggest a direct reaction of theory on practice would be paradoxical. But, if the circumstances which determine that certain kinds of conduct shall be profitable are economic, those which decide that they shall be the object of general approval are primarily moral and intellectual. For conventions to be adopted with wholehearted enthusiasm, to be not merely tolerated, but applauded, to become the habit of a nation and the admiration of its philosophers, the second condition must be present as well as the first. The insistence among men of pecuniary motives, the strength of economic egotism, the appetite for gain—these are the commonplaces of every age and need no emphasis. What is significant is the change of standards which converted a natural frailty into a resounding virtue. After all, it appears, a man can serve two masters, for—so happily is the world disposed—he may be paid by one, while he works for the other. Between the old-fashioned denunciation of uncharitable covetousness and the new-fashioned applause of economic enterprise, a bridge is thrown by the argument which urges that enterprise itself is the discharge of a duty imposed by God.
In the year 1690 appeared a pamphlet entitled A Discourse of Trade, by N. B., M.D.383 Notable for its enlightened discussion of conventional theories of the balance of trade, it is a good specimen of an indifferent genus. But its authorship was more significant than its argument. For N. B. was Dr. Nicholas Barbon; and Dr. Nicholas Barbon, currency expert, pioneer of insurance, and enthusiast for land-banks, was the son of that Praise-God Barebones, by the parody of whose alluring surname a cynical posterity recorded its verdict on the brief comedy of the Rule of the Saints over Laodicean Englishmen. The reaction from Puritan rigor to Restoration license is the most familiar of platitudes. The reaction to a mundane materialism was more gradual, more general, and ultimately of greater significance. The profligacy of the courtier had its decorous counterpart in the economic orgies of the tradesman and the merchant. Votaries, not of Bacchus, but of a more exacting and more profitable divinity, they celebrated their relief at the discredit of a too arduous idealism, by plunging with redoubled zest into the agreeable fever of making and losing money.
The transition from the anabaptist to the company promoter was less abrupt than might at first sight be supposed. It had been prepared, however unintentionally, by Puritan moralists. In their emphasis on the moral duty of untiring activity, on work as an end in itself, on the evils of luxury and extravagance, on foresight and thrift, on moderation and self-discipline and rational calculation, they had created an ideal of Christian conduct, which canonized as an ethical principle the efficiency which economic theorists were preaching as a specific for social disorders. It was as captivating as it was novel. To countless generations of religious thinkers, the fundamental maxim of Christian social ethics had seemed to be expressed in the words of St. Paul to Timothy: “Having food and raiment, let us be therewith content. For the love of money is the root of all evil.” Now, while, as always, the world battered at the gate, a new standard was raised within the citadel by its own defenders. The garrison had discovered that the invading host of economic appetites was, not an enemy, but an ally. Not sufficiency to the needs of daily life, but limitless increase and expansion, became the goal of the Christian’s efforts. Not consumption, on which the eyes of earlier sages had been turned, but production, became the pivot of his argument. Not an easygoing and openhanded charity, but a systematic and methodical accumulation, won the meed of praise that belongs to the good and faithful servant. The shrewd, calculating commercialism which tries all human relations by pecuniary standards, the acquisitiveness which cannot rest while there are competitors to be conquered or profits to be won, the love of social power and hunger for economic gain—these irrepressible appetites had evoked from time immemorial the warnings and denunciations of saints and sages. Plunged in the cleansing waters of later Puritanism, the qualities which less enlightened ages had denounced as social vices emerged as economic virtues. They emerged as moral virtues as well. For the world exists not to be enjoyed, but to be conquered. Only its conqueror deserves the name of Christian. For such a philosophy, the question, “What shall it profit a man?” carries no sting. In winning the world, he wins the salvation of his own soul as well.
The idea of economic progress as an end to be consciously sought, while ever receding, had been unfamiliar to most earlier generations of Englishmen, in which the theme of moralists had been the danger of unbridled cupidity, and the main aim of public policy had been the stability of traditional relationships. It found a new sanction in the identification of labor and enterprise with the service of God. The magnificent energy which changed in a century the face of material civilization was to draw nourishment from that temper. The worship of production and ever greater production—the slavish drudgery of the millionaire and his unhappy servants—was to be hallowed by the precepts of the same compelling creed.
Social development moves with a logic whose inferences are long delayed, and the day of these remoter applications had not yet dawned. The version of Christian ethics expounded by Puritanism in some of its later phases was still only in its vigorous youth. But it sailed forward on a flowing tide. It had an unconscious ally in the preoccupation with economic interests which found expression in the enthusiasm of business politicians for a commercial Machtpolitik. The youthful Commonwealth, a rival of Holland “for the fairest mistress in the world—trade,”384 was not two years old when it made its own essay in economic imperialism. “A barefaced war” for commerce, got up by the Royal African Company, was Clarendon’s verdict385 on the Dutch war of 1665–7. Five years later, Shaftesbury hounded the City against Holland with the cry of Delenda est Carthago. The war finance of the Protectorate had made it necessary for Cromwell to court Dutch and Jewish, as well as native, capitalists, and the impecunious Government of the Restoration was in the hands of those syndicates of goldsmiths whose rapacity the Chancellor, a survivor from the age before the deluge, when aristocrats still despised the upstart plutocracy, found not a little disgusting.386
The contemporary progress of economic thought fortified no less the mood which glorified the economic virtues. Economic science developed in England, not, as in Germany, as the handmaid of public administration, nor, as in France, through the speculations of philosophers and men of letters, but as the interpreter of the practical interests of the City. With the exception of Petty and Locke, its most eminent practitioners were business men, and the questions which excited them were those, neither of production nor of social organization, but of commerce and finance—the balance of trade, tariffs, interest, currency and credit. The rise of Political Arithmetic after the Restoration, profoundly influenced, as it was, by the Cartesian philosophy and by the progress of natural science, stamped their spontaneous and doctrineless individualism with the seal of theoretical orthodoxy. “Knowledge,” wrote the author of the preface to a work by one of the most eminent exponents of the new science, “in great measure is become mechanical.”387 The exact analysis of natural conditions, the calculations of forces and strains, the reduction of the complex to the operation of simple, constant and measurable forces, was the natural bias of an age interested primarily in mathematics and physics. Its object was “to express itself in terms of number, weight or measure, to use only arguments of sense, and to consider only such causes as have visible foundations in nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable minds, opinions, appetites and passions of particular men to the consideration of others.”388
In such an atmosphere, the moral casuistry, which had occupied so large a place in the earlier treatment of social and economic subjects, seemed the voice of an antiquated superstition. Moreover, the main economic dogma of the mercantilist had an affinity with the main ethical dogma of the Puritan, which was the more striking because the coincidence was undesigned. To the former, production, not consumption, was the pivot of the economic system, and, by what seems to the modern reader a curious perversion, consumption is applauded only because it offers a new market for productive energies. To the latter, the cardinal virtues are precisely those which find in the strenuous toils of industry and commerce their most natural expression. The typical qualities of the successful business life, in the days before the rise of joint-stock enterprise, were intensity and earnestness of labor, concentration, system and method, the initiative which broke with routine and the foresight which postponed the present to the future. Advice like that of the Reverend Mr. Steele to his City congregation was admirably calculated to give these arduous excellences a heightened status and justification. The lean goddess, Abstinence, whom Mr. Keynes, in a passage of brilliant indiscretion, has revealed as the tutelary divinity of Victorian England, was inducted to the austere splendors of her ascetic shrine by the pious hands of Puritan moralists.
Such teaching fell upon willing ears. Excluded by legislation from a direct participation in public affairs, Dissenters of means and social position threw themselves into the alternative career offered by commerce and finance, and did so the more readily because religion itself had blessed their choice. If they conformed, the character given them by their critics—“opinionating, relying much upon their own judgment … ungrateful, as not holding themselves beholden to any man … proud, as thinking themselves the only favorites of God, and the only wise or virtuous among men”389—disposed them to the left in questions of Church and State. The names of the commercial magnates of the day lend some confirmation to the suggestion of that affinity between religious radicalism and business acumen which envious contemporaries expressed in their sneers at the “Presbyterian old usurer,” “devout misers,” and “extorting Ishban.”390 The four London members elected in 1661 had not only filled the ordinary civic offices, but had held between them the governorship of the East India Company, the deputy-governorship of the Levant Company, and the masterships of the Salters and Drapers Companies; two of them were said to be Presbyterians, and two Independents.391 Of the committee of leading business men who advised Charles II’s Government on questions of commercial policy, some, like Sir Patience Ward and Michael Godfrey, represented the ultra-Protestantism of the City, while others, like Thomas Papillon and the two Houblons, were members of the French Huguenot church in London.392 In spite of the bitter commercial rivalry with Holland, both Dutch capital and Dutch ideas found an enthusiastic welcome in London.393 Sir George Downing, Charles II’s envoy at the Hague, who endeavored to acclimatize Dutch banking methods in England, and who, according to Clarendon, was one of the intriguers who prepared the war of 1665–7, had been reared in the Puritan severity of Salem and Harvard, and had been a preacher in the regiment of Colonel Okey.394 Paterson, who supplied the idea of a joint-stock banking corporation, which Michael Godfrey popularized in the City and Montagu piloted through Parliament, was, like the magnificent Law, a Scotch company promoter, who had haunted the Hague in the days when it was the home of disconsolate Whigs.395 Yarranton, most ingenious of projectors, had been an officer in the Parliamentary army, and his book was a long sermon on the virtues of the Dutch.396 Defoe, who wrote the idyll of the bourgeoisie in his Complete English Tradesman, was born of nonconformist parents, and was intended for the ministry before, having failed in trade, he took up politics and literature.397 In his admirable study of the iron industry, Mr. Ashton has shown that the most eminent iron-masters of the eighteenth century belonged as a rule to the Puritan connection.398 They had their prototype in the seventeenth century in Baxter’s friend, Thomas Foley, “who from almost nothing did get about £5,000 per annum or more by iron works.”399
To such a generation, a creed which transformed the acquisition of wealth from a drudgery or a temptation into a moral duty was the milk of lions. It was not that religion was expelled from practical life, but that religion itself gave it a foundation of granite. In that keen atmosphere of economic enterprise, the ethics of the Puritan bore some resemblance to those associated later with the name of Smiles. The good Christian was not wholly dissimilar from the economic man.
IV
The New Medicine for Poverty
To applaud certain qualities is by implication to condemn the habits and institutions which appear to conflict with them. The recognition accorded by Puritan ethics to the economic virtues, in an age when such virtues were rarer than they are today, gave a timely stimulus to economic efficiency. But it naturally, if unintentionally, modified the traditional attitude towards social obligations. For the spontaneous, doctrineless individualism, which became the rule of English public life a century before the philosophy of it was propounded by Adam Smith, no single cause was responsible. But, simultaneously with the obvious movements in the world of affairs—the discrediting of the ideal of a paternal, authoritarian Government, the breakdown of central control over local administration, the dislocation caused by the Civil War, the expansion of trade and the shifting of industry from its accustomed seats—it is perhaps not fanciful to detect in the ethics of Puritanism one force contributing to the change in social policy which is noticeable after the middle of the century.
The loftiest teaching cannot escape from its own shadow. To urge that the Christian life must be lived in a zealous discharge of private duties—how necessary! Yet how readily perverted to the suggestion that there are no vital social obligations beyond and above them! To insist that the individual is responsible, that no man can save his brother, that the essence of religion is the contact of the soul with its Maker, how true and indispensable! But how easy to slip from that truth into the suggestion that society is without responsibility, that no man can help his brother, that the social order and its consequences are not even the scaffolding by which men may climb to greater heights, but something external, alien and irrelevant—something, at best, indifferent to the life of the spirit, and, at worse, the sphere of the letter which killeth and of the reliance on works which ensnares the soul into the slumber of death! In emphasizing that God’s Kingdom is not of this world, Puritanism did not always escape the suggestion that this world is no part of God’s Kingdom. The complacent victim of that false antithesis between the social mechanism and the life of the spirit, which was to tyrannize over English religious thought for the next two centuries, it enthroned religion in the privacy of the individual soul, not without some sighs of sober satisfaction at its abdication from society. Professor Dicey has commented on the manner in which “the appeal of the Evangelicals to personal religion corresponds with the appeal of Benthamite Liberals to individual energy.”400 The same affinity between religious and social interests found an even clearer expression in the Puritan movement of the seventeenth century. Individualism in religion led insensibly, if not quite logically, to an individualist morality, and an individualist morality to a disparagement of the significance of the social fabric as compared with personal character.
A practical example of that change of emphasis is given by the treatment accorded to the questions of Enclosure and of Pauperism. For a century and a half the progress of enclosing had been a burning issue, flaring up, from time to time, into acute agitation. During the greater part of that period, from Latimer in the thirties of the sixteenth century to Laud in the thirties of the seventeenth, the attitude of religious teachers had been one of condemnation. Sermon after sermon and pamphlet after pamphlet—not to mention Statutes and Royal Commissions—had been launched against depopulation. The appeal had been, not merely to public policy, but to religion. Peasant and lord, in their different degrees, are members of one Christian commonwealth, within which the law of charity must bridle the corroding appetite for economic gain. In such a mystical corporation, knit together by mutual obligations, no man may press his advantage to the full, for no man may seek to live “outside the body of the Church.”
Sabotaged by the unpaid magistracy of country gentlemen, who had been the obstructive agents of local administration, the practical application of such doctrines had always been intermittent, and, when the Long Parliament struck the weapon of administrative law from the hands of the Crown, it had ceased altogether. But the politics of Westminster were not those of village and borough. The events which seemed to aristocratic Parliamentarians to close the revolution seemed to the left wing of the victorious army only to begin it. In that earliest and most turbulent of English democracies, where buff-coat taught scripture politics to his general, the talk was not merely of political, but of social, reconstruction. The program of the Levellers, who more than any other party could claim to express the aspirations of the unprivileged classes, included a demand, not only for annual or biennial Parliaments, manhood suffrage, a redistribution of seats in proportion to population, and the abolition of the veto of the House of Lords, but also that “you would have laid open all enclosures of fens and other commons, or have them enclosed only or chiefly for the benefit of the poor.”401 Theoretical communism, repudiated by the leading Levellers, found its expression in the agitation of the Diggers, on whose behalf Winstanley argued that, “seeing the common people of England, by joynt consent of person and purse, have caste out Charles, our Norman oppressour … the land now is to returne into the joynt hands of those who have conquered, that is the commonours,” and that the victory over the King was incomplete, as long as “wee … remayne slaves still to the kingly power in the hands of lords of manors.”402
Nor was it only from the visionary and the zealot that the pressure for redress proceeded. When the shattering of traditional authority seemed for a moment to make all things new, local grievances, buried beneath centuries of dull oppression, started to life, and in several Midland counties the peasants rose to pull down the hated hedges. At Leicester, where in 1649 there were rumors of a popular movement to throw down the enclosures of the neighboring forest, the City Council took the matter up. A petition was drafted, setting out the economic and social evils attending enclosure, and proposing the establishment of machinery to check it, consisting of a committee without whose assent enclosing was not to be permitted. A local minister was instructed to submit the petition to Parliament, “which hath still a watchful eye and open ear to redress the common grievances of the nation.”403 The agent selected to present the city’s case was the Rev. John Moore, a prolific pamphleteer, who for several years attacked the depopulating landlord with all the fervor of Latimer, though with even less than Latimer’s success.
Half a century before, such commotions would have been followed by the passing of Depopulation Acts and the issue of a Royal Commission. But, in the ten years since the meeting of the Long Parliament, the whole attitude of public policy towards the movement had begun to change. Confiscations, compositions and war taxation had effected a revolution in the distribution of property, similar, on a smaller scale, to that which had taken place at the Reformation. As land changed hands, customary relations were shaken and new interests were created. Enclosure, as Moore complained,404 was being pushed forward by means of lawsuits ending in Chancery decrees. It was not to be expected that City merchants and members of the Committee for Compounding, some of whom had found land speculation a profitable business, should hear with enthusiasm a proposal to revive the old policy of arresting enclosures by State interference, at which the gentry had grumbled for more than a century.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that reformers should have found the open ear of Parliament impenetrably closed to agrarian grievances. Nor was it only the political and economic environment which had changed. The revolution in thought was equally profound. The theoretical basis of the policy of protecting the peasant by preventing enclosure had been a conception of landownership which regarded its rights and its duties as inextricably interwoven. Property was not merely a source of income, but a public function, and its use was limited by social obligations and necessities of State. With such a doctrine the classes who had taken the lead in the struggle against the monarchy could make no truce. Its last vestiges finally disappeared when the Restoration Parliament swept away military tenures, and imposed on the nation, in the shape of an excise, the financial burden previously borne by themselves.
The theory which took its place, and which was to become in the eighteenth century almost a religion, was that expressed by Locke, when he described property as a right anterior to the existence of the State, and argued that “the supreme power cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent.” But Locke merely poured into a philosophical mould ideas which had been hammered out in the stress of political struggles, and which were already the commonplace of landowner and merchant. The view of society held by that part of the Puritan movement which was socially and politically influential had been expressed by Ireton and Cromwell in their retort to the democrats in the army. It was that only the freeholders really constituted the body politic, and that they could use their property as they pleased, uncontrolled by obligations to any superior, or by the need of consulting the mass of men, who were mere tenants at will, with no fixed interest or share in the land of the kingdom.405 Naturally, this change of ideas had profound reactions on agrarian policy. Formerly a course commending itself to all public-spirited persons, the prevention of enclosure was now discredited as the program of a sect of religious and political radicals. When Major-General Whalley in 1656 introduced a measure to regulate and restrict the enclosure of commons, framed, apparently, on the lines proposed by the authorities of Leicester, there was an instant outcry from members that it would “destroy property,” and the bill was refused a second reading.406 After the Restoration the tide began to run more strongly in the same direction. Enclosure had already become the hobby of the country gentleman. Experts advocated it on economic grounds, and legislation to facilitate it was introduced into Parliament. Though its technique still remained to be elaborated, the attitude which was to be decisive in the eighteenth century had already been crystallized.
The change of policy was striking. The reason of it was not merely that political conditions made the landed gentry omnipotent, and that the Royalist squirearchy, who streamed back to their plundered manors in 1660, were in no mood to countenance a revival, by the Government of Charles II, of the administrative interference with the rights of property which had infuriated them in the Government of Charles I. It was that opinion as to social policy had changed, and changed not least among men of religion themselves. The pursuit of economic self-interest, which is the law of nature, is already coming to be identified by the pious with the operation of the providential plan, which is the law of God. Enclosures will increase the output of wool and grain. Each man knows best what his land is suited to produce, and the general interest will be best served by leaving him free to produce it. “It is an undeniable maxim that everyone by the light of nature and reason will do that which makes for his greatest advantage. … The advancement of private persons will be the advantage of the public.”407
It is significant that such considerations were adduced, not by an economist, but by a minister. For the argument was ethical as well as economic, and, when Moore appealed to the precepts of traditional morality to bridle pecuniary interests, he provoked the retort that a judicious attention to pecuniary interests was an essential part of an enlightened morality. What the poor need for their spiritual health is—to use the favorite catchword of the age—“regulation,” and regulation is possible only if they work under the eye of an employer. In the eyes of the austere moralists of the Restoration, the first, and most neglected, virtue of the poor is industry. Common rights encourage idleness by offering a precarious and demoralizing livelihood to men who ought to be at work for a master. It is not surprising, therefore, that the admonitions of religious teachers against the wickedness of joining house to house and field to field should almost entirely cease. Long the typical example of uncharitable covetousness, enclosure is now considered, not merely economically expedient, but morally beneficial. Baxter, with all his scrupulousness—partly, perhaps, because of his scrupulousness—differs from most earlier divines in giving a qualified approval to enclosure “done in moderation by a pious man,” for the characteristic reason that a master can establish a moral discipline among his employees, which they would miss if they worked for themselves. What matters, in short, is not their circumstances, but their character. If they lose as peasants, they will gain as Christians. Opportunities for spiritual edification are more important than the mere material environment. If only the material environment were not itself among the forces determining men’s capacity to be edified!
The temper which deplored that the open-field village was not a school of the severer virtues turned on pauperism and poor relief an even more shattering criticism. There is no province of social life in which the fashioning of a new scale of ethical values on the Puritan anvil is more clearly revealed. In the little communities of peasants and craftsmen which composed medieval England, all, when Heaven sent a bad harvest, had starved together, and the misery of the sick, the orphan and the aged had appeared as a personal calamity, not as a social problem. Apart from a few precocious theorists, who hinted at the need for a universal and secular system of provision for distress, the teaching most characteristic of medieval writers had been that the relief of the needy was a primary obligation on those who had means. St. Thomas, who in this matter is typical, quotes with approval the strong words of St. Ambrose about those who cling to the bread of the starving, insists on the idea that property is stewardship, and concludes—a conclusion not always drawn from that well-worn phrase—that to withhold alms when there is evident and urgent necessity is mortal sin.408 Popular feeling had lent a half-mystical glamour both to poverty and to the compassion by which poverty was relieved, for poor men were God’s friends. At best, the poor were thought to represent our Lord in a peculiarly intimate way—“in that sect,” as Langland said, “our Saviour saved all mankind”—and it was necessary for the author of a religious manual to explain that the rich, as such, were not necessarily hateful to God.409 At worst, men reflected that the prayers of the poor availed much, and that the sinner had been saved from hell by throwing a loaf of bread to a beggar, even though a curse went with it. The alms bestowed today would be repaid a thousandfold, when the soul took its dreadful journey amid rending briars and scorching flames.
If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Everie nighte and alle,
Sit thee down and put them on,
And Christe receive thy saule.If hosen and shoon thou gavest nane,
Everie nighte and alle,
The whinnes shall pricke thee to the bare bane,
And Christe receive thy saule.⋮
If ever thou gavest meate or drinke,
Everie nighte and alle,
The fire shall never make thee shrinke,
And Christe receive thy saule.If meate or drinke thou gavest nane,
Everie nighte and alle,
The fire will burne thee to the bare bane,
And Christe receive thy saule.This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Everie nighte and alle,
Fire, and sleete, and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.410
The social character of wealth, which had been the essence of the medieval doctrine, was asserted by English divines in the sixteenth century with redoubled emphasis, precisely because the growing individualism of the age menaced the traditional conception. “The poor man,” preached Latimer, “hath title to the rich man’s goods; so that the rich man ought to let the poor man have part of his riches to help and to comfort him withal.”411 Nor had that sovereign indifference to the rigors of the economic calculus disappeared, when, under the influence partly of humanitarian representatives of the Renaissance like Vives, partly of religious reformers, partly of their own ambition to gather all the threads of social administration into their own hands, the statesmen of the sixteenth century set themselves to organize a secular system of poor relief. In England, after three generations in which the attempt was made to stamp out vagrancy by police measures of hideous brutality, the momentous admission was made that its cause was economic distress, not merely personal idleness, and that the whip had no terrors for the man who must either tramp or starve. The result was the celebrated Acts imposing a compulsory poor-rate and requiring the able-bodied man to be set on work. The Privy Council, alert to prevent disorder, drove lethargic justices hard, and down to the Civil War the system was administered with fair regularity. But the Elizabethan Poor Law was never designed to be what, with disastrous results, it became in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the sole measure for coping with economic distress. While it provided relief, it was but the last link in a chain of measures—the prevention of evictions, the control of food supplies and prices, the attempt to stabilize employment and to check unnecessary dismissals of workmen—intended to mitigate the forces which made relief necessary. Apart from the Poor Law, the first forty years of the seventeenth century were prolific in the private charity which founded alms-houses and hospitals, and established funds to provide employment or to aid struggling tradesmen. The appeal was still to religion, which owed to poverty a kind of reverence.
It was Thy choice, whilst Thou on earth didst stay,
And hadst not whereupon Thy head to lay.412
“What, speak you of such things?” said Nicholas Ferrar on his deathbed to one who commended his charities. “It would have been but a suitable return for me to have given all I had, and not to have scattered a few crumbs of alms here and there.”413
It was inevitable that, in the anarchy of the Civil War, both private charity and public relief should fall on evil days. In London, charitable endowments seem to have suffered from more than ordinary malversation, and there were complaints that the income both of Bridewell and of the Hospitals was seriously reduced.414 In the country, the records of Quarter Sessions paint a picture of confusion, in which the machinery of presentment by constables to justices has broken down, and a long wail arises, that thieves are multiplied, the poor are neglected, and vagrants wander to and fro at their will.415 The administrative collapse of the Elizabethan Poor Law continued after the Restoration, and twenty-three years later Sir Matthew Hale complained that the sections in it relating to the provision of employment were a dead letter.416 Always unpopular with the local authorities, whom they involved in considerable trouble and expense, it is not surprising that, with the cessation of pressure by the Central Government, they should, except here and there, have been neglected. What is more significant, however, than the practical deficiencies in the administration of relief, was the rise of a new school of opinion, which regarded with repugnance the whole body of social theory of which both private charity and public relief had been the expression.
“The generall rule of all England,” wrote a pamphleteer in 1646, “is to whip and punish the wandring beggars … and so many justices execute one branch of that good Statute (which is the point of justice), but as for the point of charitie, they leave [it] undone, which is to provide houses and convenient places to set the poore to work.”417 The House of Commons appears to have been conscious that the complaint had some foundation; in 1649 it ordered that the county justices should be required to see that stocks of material were provided as the law required,418 and the question of preparing new legislation to ensure that persons in distress should be found employment was on several occasions referred to committees of the House.419 Nothing seems, however, to have come of these proposals, nor was the Elizabethan policy of “setting the poor on work” that which was most congenial to the temper of the time. Upon the admission that distress was the result, not of personal deficiencies, but of economic causes, with its corollary that its victims had a legal right to be maintained by society, the growing individualism of the age turned the same frigid scepticism as was later directed against the Speenhamland policy by the reformers of 1834. Like the friends of Job, it saw in misfortune, not the chastisement of love, but the punishment for sin. The result was that, while the penalties on the vagrant were redoubled, religious opinion laid less emphasis on the obligation of charity than upon the duty of work, and that the admonitions which had formerly been turned upon uncharitable covetousness were now directed against improvidence and idleness. The characteristic sentiment was that of Milton’s friend, Hartlib: “The law of God saith, ‘he that will not work, let him not eat.’ This would be a sore scourge and smart whip for idle persons if … none should be suffered to eat till they had wrought for it.”420
The new attitude found expression in the rare bursts of public activity provoked by the growth of pauperism between 1640 and 1660. The idea of dealing with it on sound business principles, by means of a corporation which would combine profit with philanthropy, was being sedulously preached by a small group of reformers.421 Parliament took it up, and in 1649 passed an Act for the relief and employment of the poor and the punishment of beggars, under which a company was to be established with power to apprehend vagrants, to offer them the choice between work and whipping, and to set to compulsory labor all other poor persons, including children without means of maintenance.422 Eight years later the prevalence of vagrancy produced an Act of such extreme severity as almost to recall the suggestion made a generation later by Fletcher of Saltoun, that vagrants should be sent to the galleys. It provided that, since offenders could rarely be taken in the act, any vagrant who failed to satisfy the justices that he had a good reason for being on the roads should be arrested and punished as a sturdy beggar, whether actually begging or not.423
The protest against indiscriminate almsgiving, as the parade of a spurious religion, which sacrificed character to a formal piety, was older than the Reformation, but it had been given a new emphasis by the reformers. Luther had denounced the demands of beggars as blackmail, and the Swiss reformers had stamped out the remnants of monastic charity, as a bribe ministered by Popery to dissoluteness and demoralization. “I conclude that all the large givings of the papists,” preached an English divine in the reign of Elizabeth, “of which at this day many make so great brags, because they be not done in a reverent regard of the commandment of the Lord, in love, and of an inward being touched with the calamities of the needy, but for to be well reported of before men whilst they are alive, and to be prayed for after they are dead … are indeed no alms, but pharisaical trumpets.”424 The rise of a commercial civilization, the reaction against the authoritarian social policy of the Tudors, and the progress of Puritanism among the middle classes, all combined in the next half-century to sharpen the edge of that doctrine. Nurtured in a tradition which made the discipline of character by industry and self-denial the center of its ethical scheme, the Puritan moralist was undisturbed by any doubts as to whether even the seed of the righteous might not sometimes be constrained to beg its bread, and met the taunt that the repudiation of good works was the cloak for a conscienceless egoism with the retort that the easygoing openhandedness of the sentimentalist was not less selfish in its motives and was more corrupting to its objects. “As for idle beggars,” wrote Steele, “happy for them if fewer people spent their foolish pity upon their bodies, and if more shewed some wise compassion upon their souls.”425 That the greatest of evils is idleness, that the poor are the victims, not of circumstances, but of their own “idle, irregular and wicked courses,” that the truest charity is not to enervate them by relief, but so to reform their characters that relief may be unnecessary—such doctrines turned severity from a sin into a duty, and froze the impulse of natural pity with the assurance that, if indulged, it would perpetuate the suffering which it sought to allay.
Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naive psychology of the business man, who ascribes his achievements to his own unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert. That individualist complex owes part of its self-assurance to the suggestion of Puritan moralists, that practical success is at once the sign and the reward of ethical superiority. “No question,” argued a Puritan pamphleteer, “but it [riches] should be the portion rather of the godly than of the wicked, were it good for them; for godliness hath the promises of this life as well as of the life to come.”426 The demonstration that distress is a proof of demerit, though a singular commentary on the lives of Christian saints and sages, has always been popular with the prosperous. By the lusty plutocracy of the Restoration, roaring after its meat, and not indisposed, if it could not find it elsewhere, to seek it from God, it was welcomed with a shout of applause.
A society which reverences the attainment of riches as the supreme felicity will naturally be disposed to regard the poor as damned in the next world, if only to justify itself for making their life a hell in this. Advanced by men of religion as a tonic for the soul, the doctrine of the danger of pampering poverty was hailed by the rising school of Political Arithmeticians as a sovereign cure for the ills of society. For, if the theme of the moralist was that an easygoing indulgence undermined character, the theme of the economist was that it was economically disastrous and financially ruinous. The Poor Law is the mother of idleness, “men and women growing so idle and proud that they will not work, but lie upon the parish wherein they dwell for maintenance.” It discourages thrift; “if shame or fear of punishment makes him earn his dayly bread, he will do no more; his children are the charge of the parish and his old age his recess from labour or care.” It keeps up wages, since “it encourages wilful and evil-disposed persons to impose what wages they please upon their labours; and herein they are so refractory to reason and the benefit of the nation that, when corn and provisions are cheap, they will not work for less wages than when they were dear.”427 To the landowner who cursed the poor-rates, and the clothier who grumbled at the high cost of labor, one school of religious thought now brought the comforting assurance that morality itself would be favored by a reduction of both.
As the history of the Poor Law in the nineteenth century was to prove, there is no touchstone, except the treatment of childhood, which reveals the true character of a social philosophy more clearly than the spirit in which it regards the misfortunes of those of its members who fall by the way. Such utterances on the subject of poverty were merely one example of a general attitude, which appeared at times to consign to collective perdition almost the whole of the wage-earning population. It was partly that, in an age which worshiped property as the foundation of the social order, the mere laborer seemed something less than a full citizen. It was partly the result of the greatly increased influence on thought and public affairs acquired at the Restoration by the commercial classes, whose temper was a ruthless materialism, determined at all costs to conquer world-markets from France and Holland, and prepared to sacrifice every other consideration to their economic ambitions. It was partly that, in spite of a century of large-scale production in textiles, the problems of capitalist industry and of a propertyless proletariat were still too novel for their essential features to be appreciated. Even those writers, like Baxter and Bunyan, who continued to insist on the wickedness of extortionate prices and unconscionable interest, rarely thought of applying their principles to the subject of wages. Their social theory had been designed for an age of petty agriculture and industry, in which personal relations had not yet been superseded by the cash nexus, and the craftsman or peasant farmer was but little removed in economic status from the half-dozen journeymen or laborers whom he employed. In a world increasingly dominated by great clothiers, iron-masters and mine-owners, they still adhered to the antiquated categories of master and servant, with the same obstinate indifference to economic realities as leads the twentieth century to talk of employers and employed, long after the individual employer has been converted into an impersonal corporation.
In a famous passage of the Communist Manifesto, Marx observes that “the bourgeoisie, wherever 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.”428 An interesting illustration of his thesis might be found in the discussions of the economics of employment by English writers of the period between 1660 and 1760. Their characteristic was an attitude towards the new industrial proletariat noticeably harsher than that general in the first half of the seventeenth century, and which has no modern parallel except in the behavior of the less reputable of white colonists towards colored labor. The denunciations of the “luxury, pride and sloth”429 of the English wage-earners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are, indeed, almost exactly identical with those directed against African natives today. It is complained that, compared with the Dutch, they are self-indulgent and idle; that they want no more than a bare subsistence, and will cease work the moment they obtain it; that, the higher their wages, the more—“so licentious are they”430—they spend upon drink; that high prices, therefore, are not a misfortune, but a blessing, since they compel the wage-earner to be more industrious; and that high wages are not a blessing, but a misfortune, since they merely conduce to “weekly debauches.”
When such doctrines were general, it was natural that the rigors of economic exploitation should be preached as a public duty, and, with a few exceptions, the writers of the period differed only as to the methods by which severity could most advantageously be organized. Pollexfen and Walter Harris thought that salvation might be found by reducing the number of days kept as holidays. Bishop Berkeley, with the conditions of Ireland before his eyes, suggested that “sturdy beggars should … be seized and made slaves to the public for a certain term of years.” Thomas Alcock, who was shocked at the workman’s taste for snuff, tea and ribbons, proposed the revival of sumptuary legislation.431 The writers who advanced schemes for reformed workhouses, which should be places at once of punishment and of training, were innumerable. All were agreed that, on moral no less than on economic grounds, it was vital that wages should be reduced. The doctrine afterwards expressed by Arthur Young, when he wrote, “everyone but an idiot knows that the lower classes must be kept poor, or they will never be industrious,”432 was the tritest commonplace of Restoration economists. It was not argued; it was accepted as self-evident.
When philanthropists were inquiring whether it might not be desirable to reestablish slavery, it was not to be expected that the sufferings of the destitute would wring their hearts with social compunction. The most curious feature in the whole discussion, and that which is most sharply in contrast with the long debate on pauperism carried on in the sixteenth century, was the resolute refusal to admit that society had any responsibility for the causes of distress. Tudor divines and statesmen had little mercy for idle rogues. But the former always, and the latter ultimately, regarded pauperism primarily as a social phenomenon produced by economic dislocation, and the embarrassing question put by the genial Harrison—“at whose handes shall the bloude of these men be required?”433—was never far from the minds even of the most cynical. Their successors after the Restoration were apparently quite unconscious that it was even conceivable that there might be any other cause of poverty than the moral failings of the poor. The practical conclusion to be drawn from so comfortable a creed was at once extremely simple and extremely agreeable. It was not to find employment under the Act of 1601, for to do that was only “to render the poor more bold.” It was to surround the right to relief with obstacles such as those contained in the Act of 1662, to give it, when it could not be avoided, in a workhouse or house of correction, and, for the rest, to increase the demand for labor by reducing wages.
The grand discovery of a commercial age, that relief might be so administered as not merely to relieve, but also to deter, still remained to be made by Utilitarian philosophers. But the theory that distress was due, not to economic circumstances, but to what the Poor Law Commissioners of 1834 called “individual improvidence and vice,” was firmly established, and the criticism on the Elizabethan system which was to inspire the new Poor Law had already been formulated. The essence of that system was admirably expressed a century later by a Scottish divine as “the principle that each man, simply because he exists, holds a right on other men or on society for existence.”434 Dr. Chalmers’ attack upon it was the echo of a note long struck by Puritan moralists. And the views of Dr. Chalmers had impressed themselves on Nassau Senior,435 before he set his hand to that brilliant, influential and wildly unhistorical Report, which, after provoking something like a rebellion in the north of England, was to be one of the pillars of the social policy of the nineteenth century.
It would be misleading to dwell on the limitations of Puritan ethics without emphasizing the enormous contribution of Puritanism to political freedom and social progress. The foundation of democracy is the sense of spiritual independence which nerves the individual to stand alone against the powers of this world, and in England, where squire and parson, lifting arrogant eyebrows at the insolence of the lower orders, combined to crush popular agitation, as a menace at once to society and to the Church, it is probable that democracy owes more to Nonconformity than to any other single movement. The virtues of enterprise, diligence and thrift are the indispensable foundation of any complex and vigorous civilization. It was Puritanism which, by investing them with a supernatural sanction, turned them from an unsocial eccentricity into a habit and a religion. Nor would it be difficult to find notable representatives of the Puritan spirit in whom the personal austerity, which was the noblest aspect of the new ideal, was combined with a profound consciousness of social solidarity, which was the noblest aspect of that which it displaced. Firmin the philanthropist, and Bellers the Quaker, whom Owen more than a century later hailed as the father of his doctrines, were pioneers of Poor Law reform. The Society of Friends, in an age when the divorce between religion and social ethics was almost complete, met the prevalent doctrine, that it was permissible to take such gain as the market offered, by insisting on the obligation of good conscience and forbearance in economic transactions, and on the duty to make the honorable maintenance of the brother in distress a common charge.436
The general climate and character of a country are not altered, however, by the fact that here and there it has peaks which rise into an ampler air. The distinctive note of Puritan teaching was different. It was individual responsibility, not social obligation. Training its pupils to the mastery of others through the mastery of self, it prized as a crown of glory the qualities which arm the spiritual athlete for his solitary contest with a hostile world, and dismissed concern with the social order as the prop of weaklings and the Capua of the soul. Both the excellences and the defects of that attitude were momentous for the future. It is sometimes suggested that the astonishing outburst of industrial activity which took place after 1760 created a new type of economic character, as well as a new system of economic organization. In reality, the ideal which was later to carry all before it, in the person of the inventor and engineer and captain of industry, was well established among Englishmen before the end of the seventeenth century. Among the numerous forces which had gone to form it, some not inconsiderable part may reasonably be ascribed to the emphasis on the life of business enterprise as the appropriate field for Christian endeavor, and on the qualities needed for success in it, which was characteristic of Puritanism. These qualities, and the admiration of them, remained, when the religious reference, and the restraints which it imposed, had weakened or disappeared.