Chapter IV
| Pleasant Observations | ||
| of | Profitable Applications and | |
| Serious Reflections. |
All concluded with so many spiritual poems. Whereunto is now added,
A sober conversation of the sin of drunkenness.
The Harlot’s face in the scripture-glass, etc.
Being an essay towards their much desired Reformation from the horrible and detestable sins of Drunkenness, Swearing, Uncleanness, Forgetfulness of Mercies, Violation of Promises, and Atheistical Contempt of Death. 1682.
The author of this cheerful work was a Devonshire minister, John Flavell, who also wrote Husbandry Spiritualized, or the Heavenly Use of Earthly Things, 1669. In him, as in Steele, the Chadband touch is unmistakable. The Religious Weaver, apparently by one Fawcett, I have not been able to trace.
Notes
1 Tucker, A Brief Essay on the Advantages and Disadvantages which respectively attend France and Great Britain with regard to Trade, 1750, p. 33. The best account of Tucker, most of whose works are scarce, is given by W. E. Clark, Josiah Tucker, Economist (Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, Columbia University, vol. xix, 1903-5).
2 Reliquiæ Baxterianæ: or Mr. Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the most memorable Passages of his Life and Times, 1696, p. 5.
3 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress.
4 The Life of the Duke of Newcastle, by Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle (Everyman ed., 1915, p. 153).
5 Baxter, op. cit., p. 31.
6 Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress.
7 Baxter, op. cit., p. 89.
8 Thomas Fuller, The Holy and Profane States, 1884 ed., p. 122.
9 Quoted S. Seyer, Memoirs of Bristol, vol. ii, 1823, p. 314.
10 R. G. Usher, The Reconstruction of the English Church, vol. i, 1910, pp. 249-50.
11 Baxter, op. cit., p. 30.
12 An orderly and plaine Narration of the Beginnings and Causes of this Warre, 1644, p. 4 (Brit. Mus., Thomason Tracts, E. 54 [3]). I owe this reference to the kindness of Father Paschal Larkin.
13 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. vi, par. 271.
14 Parker, Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie, 1670, Preface, p. xxxix.
15 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, written by himself, 1827 ed., vol. iii, p. 101.
16 D. C. A. Agnew, Protestant Exiles from France, 1886, vol. i, pp. 20-1. In 1640 the Root and Branch Petition included, among the evils due to the Bishops, “the discouragement and destruction of all good subjects, of whom are multitudes, both clothiers, merchants and others, who, being deprived of their ministers, and overburthened with these pressures, have departed the kingdom to Holland and other parts, and have drawn with them a great manufacture of cloth and trading out of the land into other places where they reside, whereby wool, the great staple of the kingdom, is become of small value, and vends not, trading is decayed, many poor people want work, seamen lose employment, and the whole land is much impoverished” (S. R. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1628-60 [1889], p. 73). For instances of the comparatively liberal treatment of alien immigrants under Elizabeth, see Tawney and Power, Tudor Economic Documents, vol. i, section vi, nos. 3, 4, 11 (2), 15, and Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, 1921, pt. i, pp. 79-84.
17 Toryism and Trade can never agree, 1713, p. 12. The tract is wrongly ascribed to Davenant by H. Levy, Economic Liberalism, 1913, p. 12.
18 See, e.g., G. Martin, La Grande Industrie sous le règne de Louis XIV, 1899, chap. xvii, where the reports of several intendants are quoted; and Levasseur, Histoire du commerce de la France, 1911, vol. i, p. 421.
19 A Letter from a Gentleman in the City to a Gentleman in the Country about the Odiousness of Persecution, 1677, p. 29.
20 Sir Wm. Temple, Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands, chap. v, vi.
21 The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland and West-Friesland, 1702, pt. i, chap. xiv.
22 Petty, Political Arithmetic, 1690, pp. 25-6.
23 The Present Interest of England stated, by a Lover of his King and Country, 1671. I am indebted to Mr. A. P. Wadsworth for calling my attention to the passage quoted in the text. The same point is put more specifically by Lawrence Braddon: “The superstition of their religion obligeth France to keep (at least) fifty Holy days more than we are obliged to keep; and every such day wherein no work is done is one hundred and twenty thousand pounds loss to the deluded people” (Abstract of the Draft of a Bill for relieving, reforming and employing the Poor, 1717). See also Defoe, in his Enquiry into Occasional Conformity, 1702, pp. 18-19: “We wonder, gentlemen, you will accept our money on your deficient funds, our stocks to help carry on your wars, our loans and credits to your victualling office and navy office. If you would go on to distinguish us, get a law made we shall buy no lands, that we may not be freeholders; and see if you could find money to buy us out. Transplant us into towns and bodies, and let us trade by our selves; let us card, spin, knit, weave and work with and for one another, and see how you’ll maintain your own poor without us. Let us fraight our ships apart, keep our money out of your Bank, accept none of our bills, and separate your selves as absolutely from us in civil matters, as we do from you in religious, and see how you can go on without us.”
24 Swift, Examiner.
25 Bolingbroke, Letter to Sir Wm. Windham, 1753, p. 21.
26 Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (see note 2), p. 94. He goes on: “The generality of the Master Workmen [i.e., employers] lived but a little better than their journeymen (from hand to mouth), but only that they laboured not altogether so hard.”
27 Voltaire, Lettres Philosophiques, no. x, and Montesquieu, Esprit des Lois, xix, 27, and xx, 22. See also the remarks to the same effect in D’Argenson, Considérations sur le Gouvernement de la France, 1765.
28 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, 1673.
29 Marston, Eastward Ho!, act I, sc. i.
30 Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, bk. i, par. 163.
31 Petty, Political Arithmetic, 1690, p. 23.
32 Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus, first published in the Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik Statistik, vols. xx, xxi, and since reprinted in vol. i of his Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, 1920; Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen and Protestantism and Progress, 1912; Schulze-Gaevernitz, Britischer Imperialismus und Englischer Freihandel, 1906; Cunningham, Christianity and Economic Science, 1914, chap. v.
Weber’s essay gave rise to much discussion in Germany. Its main thesis—that Calvinism, and in particular English Puritanism, from which nearly all his illustrations are drawn, played a part of preponderant importance in creating moral and political conditions favorable to the growth of capitalist enterprise—appears to be accepted by Troeltsch, Die Soziallehren der Christlichen Kirchen, pp. 704 seqq. It is submitted to a critical analysis by Brentano (Die Anfänge des modernen Kapitalismus, 1916, pp. 117-57), who dissents from many of Weber’s conclusions. Weber’s essay is certainly one of the most fruitful examinations of the relations between religion and social theory which has appeared, and I desire to acknowledge my indebtedness to it, in particular with reference to its discussion of the economic application given by some Puritan writers to the idea expressed by the word “calling.” At the same time, there are several points on which Weber’s arguments appear to me to be one-sided and overstrained, and on which Brentano’s criticisms of it seem to me to be sound.
Thus (i), as was perhaps inevitable in an essay dealing with economic and social thought, as distinct from changes in economic and social organization, Weber seems to me to explain by reference to moral and intellectual influences developments which have their principal explanation in another region altogether. There was plenty of the “capitalist spirit” in fifteenth-century Venice and Florence, or in south Germany and Flanders, for the simple reason that these areas were the greatest commercial and financial centers of the age, though all were, at least nominally, Catholic. The development of capitalism in Holland and England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was due, not to the fact that they were Protestant powers, but to large economic movements, in particular the Discoveries and the results which flowed from them. Of course material and psychological changes went together, and of course the second reacted on the first. But it seems a little artificial to talk as though capitalist enterprise could not appear till religious changes had produced a capitalist spirit. It would be equally true, and equally one-sided, to say that the religious changes were purely the result of economic movements.
(ii) Weber ignores, or at least touches too lightly on, intellectual movements, which were favorable to the growth of business enterprise and to an individualist attitude towards economic relations, but which had little to do with religion. The political thought of the Renaissance was one; as Brentano points out, Machiavelli was at least as powerful a solvent of traditional ethical restraints as Calvin. The speculations of business men and economists on money, prices and the foreign exchanges were a second. Both contributed to the temper of single-minded concentration on pecuniary gain, which Weber understands by the capitalist spirit.
(iii) He appears greatly to over-simplify Calvinism itself. In the first place, he apparently ascribes to the English Puritans of the seventeenth century the conception of social ethics held by Calvin and his immediate followers. In the second place, he speaks as though all English Puritans in the seventeenth century held much the same view of social duties and expediency. Both suggestions are misleading. On the one hand, the Calvinists of the sixteenth century (including English Puritans) were believers in a rigorous discipline, and the individualism ascribed not unjustly to the Puritan movement in its later phases would have horrified them. The really significant question is that of the causes of the change from the one standpoint to the other, a question which Weber appears to ignore. On the other hand, there were within seventeenth-century Puritanism a variety of elements, which held widely different views as to social policy. As Cromwell discovered, there was no formula which would gather Puritan aristocrats and Levellers, landowners and Diggers, merchants and artisans, buff-coat and his general, into the fold of a single social theory. The issue between divergent doctrines was fought out within the Puritan movement itself. Some won; others lost.
Both “the capitalist spirit” and “Protestant ethics,” therefore, were a good deal more complex than Weber seems to imply. What is true and valuable in his essay is his insistence that the commercial classes in seventeenth-century England were the standard-bearers of a particular conception of social expediency, which was markedly different from that of the more conservative elements in society—the peasants, the craftsmen, and many landed gentry—and that that conception found expression in religion, in politics, and, not least, in social and economic conduct and policy.
33 Cunningham, The Moral Witness of the Church on the Investment of Money and the Use of Wealth, 1909, p. 25.
34 Knox, The Buke of Discipline, in Works, ed. D. Laing, vol. ii, 1848, pp. 183 seqq.; Thos. Cartwright, A Directory of Church Government (printed in D. Neal, History of the Puritans, 1822, vol. v, Appx. iv); W. Travers, A Full and Plain Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline, 1574; J. Udall, A Demonstration of the Trueth of that Discipline which Christe hath prescribed in his Worde for the Government of his Church, 1589; Bancroft, Dangerous Positions and Proceedings published and practised within this Iland of Brytaine under Pretence of Reformation and for the Presbyteriall Discipline, 1593 (part reprinted in R. G. Usher, The Presbyterian Movement in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, as illustrated by the Minute Book of the Dedham Classis, 1905).
35 Cartwright, op. cit.
36 Usher, op. cit., p. 1.
37 Ibid., pp. 14-15, for Bancroft’s account of the procedure.
38 Quoted from Baillie’s Letters by W. A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under the Commonwealth, 1900, vol. i, p. 128.
39 Shaw, op. cit., vol. ii, chap. iii (The Presbyterian System, 1646-60). For the practical working of Presbyterian discipline, see Chetham Society, vols. xx, xxii, xxiv, Minutes of the Manchester Classis, and vols. xxxvi, xli, Minutes of the Bury Classis.
40 See Chap. III, p. 142.
41 Puritan Manifestoes, p. 120, quoted by H. G. Wood, The Influence of the Reformation on Ideas concerning Wealth and Property, in Property, its Rights and Duties, 1913, p. 142. Mr. Wood’s essay contains an excellent discussion of the whole subject, and I should like here to acknowledge my obligations to it. For the views of Knewstub, Smith, and Baro, see the quotations from them printed by Haweis, Sketches of the Reformation, 1844, pp. 237-40, 243-6. It should be noted that Baro, while condemning those who, “sitting idle at home, make merchandise only of their money, by giving it out in this sort to needy persons... without having any regard of his commodity to whome they give it, but only of their own gain,” nevertheless admitted that interest was not always to be condemned. See also Thos. Fuller, History of the University of Cambridge, ed. M. Prickett and T. Wright, 1840, pp. 275-6, 288-9, and Cunningham, Growth of English Industry and Commerce, Modern Times, 1921 ed., pt. i, pp. 157-8.
42 New Shakespeare Society, Series vi, no. 6, 1877-9, Phillip Stubbes’s Anatomy of the Abuses in England, ed. F. J. Furnivall, pp. 115-16.
43 W. Ames, De Conscientia et eius iure vel casibus libri quinque, bk. v, chaps. xliii, xliv. Ames (1576-1633) was educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge, tried to settle at Colchester, but was forbidden to preach by the Bishop of London, went to Leyden about 1610, was appointed to the theological chair at Franeker in 1622, where he remained for ten years, and died at Rotterdam.
44 E.g., Stubbes, op. cit.; Richard Capel, Temptations, their Nature, Danger, Cure, 1633; John Moore, The Crying Sin of England of not caring for the Poor; wherein Inclosure, viz. such as doth unpeople Townes, and uncorn Fields, is arraigned, convicted and condemned, 1653.
45 J. O. Halliwell, The Autobiography and Correspondence of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, 1845, vol. i, pp. 206-10, 322, 354; vol. ii, pp. 96, 153-4.
46 Usher, op. cit. (see note 34 above), pp. 32, 53, 70, 99-100.
47 Sept. 26, 1645, it is resolved “that it shall be in the power of the eldership to suspend from the sacrament of the Lord’s supper any person that shall be legally attainted of Barratry, Forgery, Extortion, Perjury, or Bribery” (Commons’ Journals, vol. iv, p. 290).
48 Chetham Society, Minutes of the Bury Presbyterian Classis, 1647-57, pt. i, pp. 32-3. The Cambridge classis (ibid., pt. ii, pp. 196-7) decided in 1657 that the ordinance of Parliament of August 29, 1648 should be taken as the rule of the classis in the matter of scandal. The various scandals mentioned in the ordinance included extortion, and the classis decided that “no person lawfully convict of any of the foresaid scandalls bee admitted to the Lord’s supper without signification of sincere repentance,” but it appears (p. 198) to have been mainly interested in witches, wizards, and fortune-tellers.
49 Hist. MSS. Comm., Report on MSS. in various Collections, vol. i, 1901, p. 132.
50 Quoted by F. J. Powicke, A Life of the Reverend Richard Baxter, 1924, p. 92.
51 Selections from those parts of The Christian Directory which bear on social ethics are printed by Jeannette Tawney, Chapters from Richard Baxter’s Christian Directory, 1925, in which most of the passages quoted in the text will be found.
52 Reliquiæ Baxterianæ (see note 2), p. 1.
53 Life and Death of Mr. Badman (Cambridge English Classics, 1905), pp. 116-25, where Bunyan discusses at length the ethics of prices.
54 Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, Letter ii.
55 See on these points Weber, op. cit. (note 32 above), p. 94, whose main conclusions I paraphrase.
56 Milton, A Defence of the People of England (1692 ed.), p. xvii.
57 See, e.g., Thos. Wilson, A Discourse upon Usury, Preface, 1925 ed., p. 178: “There bee two sortes of men that are alwayes to bee looked upon very narrowly, the one is the dissemblinge gospeller, and the other is the wilfull and indurate papiste. The first under colour of religion overthroweth all religion, and bearing good men in hande that he loveth playnesse, useth covertelie all deceypte that maye bee, and for pryvate gayne undoeth the common welfare of man. And touching thys sinne of usurie, none doe more openly offende in thys behalfe than do these counterfeite professours of thys pure religion.”
58 Fenton, A Treatise of Usurie, 1612, pp. 60-1.
59 Brief Survey of the Growth of Usury in England, 1673.
60 S. Richardson, The Cause of the Poor Pleaded, 1653, Thomason Tracts, E. 703 (9), p. 14. For other references, see note 72 below. For extortionate prices, see Thomason Tracts, E. 399 (6), The Worth of a Penny, or a Caution to keep Money, 1647. I am indebted for this and subsequent references to the Thomason Tracts to Miss P. James.
61 Hooker, Preface to The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Everyman ed., 1907, vol. i, p. 128.
62 Wilson, op. cit., p. 250.
63 Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, written by his Widow Lucy, Everyman ed., 1908, pp. 64-5.
64 See the references given in note 66.
65 The Earl of Strafforde’s Letters and Despatches, by William Knowler, D.D., 1739, vol. ii, p. 138.
66 No attempt has been made in the text to do more than refer to the points on which the economic interests and outlook of the commercial and propertied classes brought them into collision with the monarchy, and only the most obvious sources of information are mentioned here. For patents and monopolies, including the hated soap monopoly, see G. Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London, 1908, chap. xvii, and W. Hyde Price, The English Patents of Monopoly, 1906, chap. xi, and passim. For the control of exchange business, Cambium Regis, or the Office of his Majesties Exchange Royall, declaring and justifying his Majesties Right and the Convenience thereof, 1628, and Ruding, Annals of the Coinage, 1819, vol. iv, pp. 201-10. For the punishment of speculation by the Star Chamber, and for projects of public granaries, Camden Society, N.S., vol. xxxix, 1886, Reports of Cases in the Courts of Star Chamber and High Commission, ed. S. R. Gardiner, pp. 43 seqq., 82 seqq., and N. S. B. Gras, The Evolution of the English Corn Market, 1915, pp. 246-50. For the control of the textile industry and the reaction against it, H. Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries, 1920, chaps. iv, vii; Kate E. Barford, The West of England Cloth Industry: A seventeenth-century Experiment in State Control, in the Wiltshire Archæological and Natural History Magazine, Dec., 1924, pp. 531-42; R. R. Reid, The King’s Council in the North, 1921, pt. iv, chap. ii; Victoria County History, Suffolk, vol. ii, pp. 263-8. For the intervention of the Privy Council to raise the wages of textile workers and to protect craftsmen, Tawney, The Assessment of Wages in England by the Justices of the Peace, in the Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-und Wirthschaftsgeschichte, Bd. xi, 1913, pp. 307-37, 533-64; Leonard, The Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 160-3; Victoria County History, Suffolk, vol. ii, pp. 268-9; and Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 1904, pp. 142-7. For the Depopulation Commissions, Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century, pp. 376, 391. For the squeezing of money from the East India Company and the infringement of its Charter, Shafa’at Ahmad Khan, The East India Trade in the XVIIth Century, 1923, pp. 69-73. For the colonial interests of Puritan members, A. P. Newton, The Colonising Activities of the English Puritans, 1914, and C. E. Wade, John Pym, 1912.
67 E. Laspeyres, Geschichte der Volkswirthschaftlichen Anschauungen der Niederländer und ihrer Litteratur zur Zeit der Republik, 1863, pp. 256-70. An idea of the points at issue can be gathered from the exhaustive (and unreadable) work of Salmasius, De Modo Usurarum, 1639.
68 John Quick, Synodicon in Gallia Reformata, 1692, vol. i, p. 99.
69 For the change of sentiment in America, see Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, pp. 117-27; for Franklin, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Benjamin Franklin, and Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism, 1915, pp. 116-21.
70 Rev. Robert Woodrow (quoted by Sombart, op. cit., p. 149).
71 John Cooke, Unum Necessarium or the Poore Man’s Case (1648), which contains a plea for the regulation of prices and the establishment of Monts de Piété.
72 For the scandal caused to the Protestant religion by its alleged condonation of covetousness, see T. Watson, A Plea for Alms, 1658 (Thomason Tracts, E. 2125), pp. 21, 33-4: “The Church of Rome layes upon us this aspersion that we are against good workes.... I am sorry that any who go for honest men should be brought into the indightment; I mean that any professors should be impeached as guilty of this sinne of covetousnesse and unmercifulnesse.... I tell you these devout misers are the reproach of Christianity.... I may say of penurious votaries, they have the wings of profession by which they seem to fly to heaven, but the feet of beasts, walking on the earth and even licking the dust.... Oh, take heed, that, seeing your religion will not destroy your covetousnesse, at last your covetousnesse does not destroy your religion.” See also Sir Balthazar Gerbier, A New Year’s Result in favour of the Poore, 1651 (Thomason Tracts, E. 651 [14]), p. 4: “If the Papists did rely as much on faith as the reformed professors of the Gospel (according to our English tenets) doe, or that the reformed professors did so much practice charity as the Papists doe?”
73 S. Richardson, op. cit. (see note 60 above), pp. 7-8, 10.
74 The first person to emphasize the way in which the idea of a “calling” was used as an argument for the economic virtues was Weber (see note 32 above), to whose conclusions I am largely indebted for the following paragraphs.
75 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress.
76 Richard Steele, The Tradesman’s Calling, being a Discourse concerning the Nature, Necessity, Choice, etc., of a Calling in general, 1684, pp. 1, 4.
77 Ibid., pp. 21-2.
78 Ibid., p. 35.
79 Baxter, Christian Directory, 1678 ed., vol. i, p. 336b.
80 Thomas Adams (quoted Weber, op. cit., p. 96 n.).
81 Matthew Henry, The Worth of the Soul (quoted ibid., p. 168 n.).
82 Baxter, op. cit., vol. i, p. 111a.
83 Steele, op. cit., p. 20.
84 Baxter, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 378b, 108b; vol. iv, p. 253a.
85 Navigation Spiritualized: or a New Compass for Seamen, consisting of xxxii Points:
86 Steele, op. cit. (see note 76 above).
87 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress.
88 David Jones, A Farewell Sermon at St. Mary Woolnoth’s, 1692.
89 Nicholas Barbon, A Discourse of Trade, 1690, ed. by Professor John H. Hollander (A Reprint of Economic Tracts, Series ii, no. 1).
90 The words of a member of the Long Parliament, quoted by C. H. Firth, Oliver Cromwell, 1902, p. 313.
91 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, 1827 ed., vol. ii, p. 235: “The merchants took much delight to enlarge themselves upon this argument [i.e., the advantages of war], and shortly after to discourse ‘of the infinite benefit that would accrue from a barefaced war against the Dutch, how easily they might be subdued and the trade carried by the English.’” According to Clarendon, who despised the merchants and hated the whole business, it was almost a classical example of a commercial war, carefully stage-managed in all its details, from the directorship which the Royal African Company gave to the Duke of York down to the inevitable “incident” with which hostilities began.
92 Ibid., vol. iii, pp. 7-9.
93 Sir Dudley North, Discourses upon Trade, 1691, Preface.
94 Petty, Political Arithmetic, Preface.
95 Chamberlayne, Angliæ Notitia (quoted P. E. Dove, Account of Andrew Yarranton, 1854, p. 82 n.).
96 Roger North, The Lives of the Norths (1826 ed.), vol. iii, p. 103; T. Watson, A Plea for Alms (Thomason Tracts, E. 2125); p. 33; Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, 2nd part, 1682, p. 9, where Sir Robert Clayton, Lord Mayor 1679-80, and Member of Parliament for the City 1679-81 and again from 1689, appears as “extorting Ishban.” He was a scrivener who had made his money by usury.
97 John Fawke, Sir William Thompson, William Love, and John Jones.
98 Charles King (The British Merchant, 1721, vol. i, p. 181) gives the following persons as signatories of an analysis of the trade between England and France in 1674: Patience Ward, Thomas Papillon, James Houblon, William Bellamy, Michael Godfrey, George Toriano, John Houblon, John Houghe, John Mervin, Peter Paravicine, John Dubois, Benj. Godfrey, Edm. Harrison, Benj. Delaune. The number of foreign names is remarkable.
99 For Dutch capital in London, see Hist. MSS. Comm., 8th Report, 1881, p. 134 (proceedings of the Committee on the decay of trade, 1669); with regard to investment of foreign capital in England, it was stated that “Alderman Bucknell had above £100,000 in his hands, Mr. Meynell above £30,000, Mr. Vandeput at one time £60,000, Mr. Dericost always near £200,000 of Dutch money, lent to merchants at 7, 6, and 5 per cent.”
100 The Life of Edward, Earl of Clarendon, vol. ii, pp. 289-93, and vol. iii, pp. 4-7; and John Beresford, The Godfather of Downing Street, 1925.
101 S. Bannister, William Paterson, the Merchant-Statesman, and Founder of the Bank of England: His Life and Trials, 1858.
102 A. Yarranton, England’s Improvement, 1677.
103 The Complete English Tradesman (1726) belongs to the same genus as the book of Steele (see above, pp. 244-6), but it has reduced Christianity to even more innocuous proportions: see Letter xvii (Of Honesty in Dealing).
104 T. S. Ashton, Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution, 1924, pp. 211-26. Mr. A. P. Wadsworth has shown that the leading Lancashire clothiers were often Nonconformists (History of the Rochdale Woollen Trade, in Trans. Rochdale Lit. and Sci. Soc., vol. xv, 1925).
105 Quoted F. J. Powicke, Life of Baxter, 1924, p. 158.
106 Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England, 1905, pp. 400-1.
107 The Humble Petition of Thousands of well-affected Persons inhabiting the City of London, Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, Hamlets, and Places adjacent (Bodleian Pamphlets, The Levellers’ Petitions, c. 15, 3 Linc.). See also G. P. Gooch, English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century, 1898.
108 Camden Society, The Clarke Papers, ed. C. H. Firth, 1891-4, vol. ii, pp. 217-21 (letter from Winstanley to Fairfax and the Council of War, Dec. 8, 1649).
109 Records of the Borough of Leicester, 1603-88, ed. Helen Stocks, 1923, pp. 370, 414, 428-30.
110 John Moore, op. cit. (see note 44, above), p. 13. See also E. C. K. Gonner, Common Land and Enclosure, 1912, pp. 53-5.
111 Camden Society, The Clarke Papers, vol. i, pp. 299 seqq., lxvii seqq.
112 The Diary of Thomas Burton, ed. J. T. Rutt, 1828, vol. i, pp. 175-6. A letter from Whalley, referring to agitations against enclosure in Warwickshire, Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire and Leicestershire, will be found in Thurloe, State Papers, vol. iv, p. 686.
113 Joseph Lee, A Vindication of a Regulated Enclosure, 1656, p. 9.
114 Aquinas, Summa Theol., 2a 2æ, Q. xxxii, art. v.
115 Dives et Pauper, 1493, Prol., chap. vii; cf. Pecock, The Repressor of over-much Blaming of the Clergy, pt. iii, chap. iv, pp. 296-7. For an excellent account of the medieval attitude towards the poor, see B. L. Manning, The People’s Faith in the Time of Wyclif, 1919, chap. x.
116 A Lyke-wake Dirge, printed by W. Allingham, The Ballad Book, 1907, no. xxxi.
117 Latimer, The fifth Sermon on the Lord’s Prayer (in Sermons, Everyman ed., p. 336). Cf. Tyndale, The Parable of the Wicked Mammon (in Doctrinal Treatises of William Tyndale, Parker Society, 1848, p. 97): “If thy brother or neighbour therefore need, and thou have to help him, and yet showest not mercy, but withdrawest thy hands from him, then robbest thou him of his own, and art a thief.”
118 Christopher Harvey, The Overseer of the Poor (in G. Gilfillan, The Poetical Works of George Herbert, 1853, pp. 241-3).
119 J. E. B. Mayor, Two Lives of N. Ferrar, by his brother John and Dr. Jebb, p. 261 (quoted by B. Kirkman Gray, A History of English Philanthropy, 1905, p. 54).
120 A True Report of the Great Cost and Charges of the foure Hospitals in the City of London, 1644 (quoted, ibid., p. 66).
121 See, e.g., Hist. MSS. Comm., Reports on MSS. in various Collections, vol. i, 1901, pp. 109-24; Leonard, Early History of English Poor Relief, pp. 268-9.
122 Sir Matthew Hale, A Discourse touching Provision for the Poor, 1683.
123 Stanley’s Remedy, or the Way how to reform wandering Beggars, Thieves, Highway Robbers and Pick-pockets, 1646 (Thomason Tracts, E. 317 (6)), p. 4.
124 Commons’ Journals, March 19, 1648/9, vol. vi, p. 167.
125 Ibid., vol. vi, pp. 201, 374, 416, 481; vol. vii, p. 127.
126 Samuel Hartlib, London’s Charity Inlarged, 1650, p. i.
127 Hartlib, op. cit.
128 Firth and Rait, Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1911, vol. ii, pp. 104-10. An ordinance creating a corporation had been passed Dec. 17, 1647 (ibid., vol. i, pp. 1042-5).
129 Ibid., vol. ii, pp. 1098-9.
130 Stockwood, at Paul’s Cross, 1578 (quoted by Haweis, Sketches of the Reformation, p. 277).
131 Steele, op. cit. (note 76 above), p. 22.
132 R. Younge, The Poores’ Advocate, 1654 (Thomason Tracts, E. 1452 [3]), p. 6.
133 For these and other passages from Restoration economists to the same effect, see a striking article by Dr. T. E. Gregory on The Economics of Employment in England (1660-1713) in Economica, no. i, Jan., 1921, pp. 37 seqq., and E. S. Furniss, The Position of the Labourer in a System of Nationalism, 1920, chaps. v, vi.
134 Das Kommunistische Manifest, 1918 ed., pp. 27-8: “Die Bourgeoisie, wo sie zur Herrschaft gekommen, hat alle feudalen, patriarchalischen, idyllischen verhältnisse zerstört. Sie hat die buntscheckigen Feudalbande, die den Menschen an seinen natürlichen Vorgesetzten knüpften, unbarmherzig zerrissen, und kein anderes Band zwischen Mensch und Mensch übrig gelassen, als das nackte Interesse, als die gefühllose bare Zahlung.”
135 Defoe, Giving Alms no Charity, 1704, pp. 25-7.
136 Petty, Political Arithmetic, p. 45.
137 Sir Henry Pollexfen, Discourse of Trade, 1697, p. 49; Walter Harris, Remarks on the Affairs and Trade of England and Ireland, 1691, pp. 43-4; The Querist, 1737 (in The Works of George Berkeley, D.D., ed. A. C. Fraser, 1871, p. 387); Thomas Alcock, Observations on the Defects of the Poor Laws, 1752, pp. 45 seqq. (quoted Furniss, op. cit., p. 153).
138 Arthur Young, Eastern Tour, 1771, vol. iv, p. 361.
139 Harrison, The Description of Britaine, 1587 ed., bk. ii, chap. x, Of Provision made for the Poor.
140 H. Hunter, Problems of Poverty: Selections from the... Writings of Thomas Chalmers, D.D., 1912, p. 202.
141 For the influence of Chalmers’ idea on Senior, and, through him, on the new Poor Law of 1834, see T. Mackay, History of the English Poor Law, vol. iii, 1899, pp. 32-4. Chalmers held that any Poor Law was in itself objectionable. Senior, who described Chalmers’ evidence before the Committee on the State of the Poor in Ireland as “the most instructive, perhaps, that ever was given before a Committee of the House of Commons,” appears to have begun by agreeing with him, but later to have adopted the principle of deterrence, backed by the test workhouse, as a second best. The Commissioners of 1832-4 were right in thinking the existing methods of relief administration extremely bad; they were wrong in supposing distress to be due mainly to lax administration, instead of realizing, as was the fact, that lax administration had arisen as an attempt to meet the increase of distress. Their discussion of the causes of pauperism is, therefore, extremely superficial, and requires to be supplemented by the evidence contained in the various contemporary reports (such, e.g., as those on the hand-loom weavers) dealing with the industrial aspects of the problem.
142 W. C. Braithwaite, The Second Period of Quakerism, 1919, pp. 560-2. Defoe comments on the strict business standards of the Quakers in Letter xvii (Of Honesty in Dealing) in The Complete English Tradesman. Mr. Ashton (Iron and Steel in the Industrial Revolution, p. 219) remarks, “The eighteenth century Friend no less than the medieval Catholic held firmly to some doctrine of Just Price,” and quotes examples from the conduct of Quaker iron-masters.