with guns and munition of war. From the beginning of the reign, lord Burghley set himself steadily and persistently to introduce new industries from abroad; but he was careful that they should not be injurious to existing trades, and that they should be really planted in the country, and not merely carried on by foreigners settled in England, who had no abiding interest in the realm. The same policy was pursued, though with less wisdom and caution, by both James I and Charles I. On paper, their schemes for introducing the art of dyeing, the manufacture of alum, the development of a silk industry and the use of native materials in the manufacture of soap, appeared admirable; but the projects were not practically successful, and private interests were roused in opposition without the attainment of any real public good. Sometimes, these attempts were made by concessions granted for a period of years; sometimes, they were undertaken by the crown under official management. James and Charles could not but be inspired by the successes of Henri IV in dealing with similar problems in France; but they were unfortunate in not having advisers of the capacity of Sully and Olivier de Serres. The attempts made under Elizabeth and the early Stewarts to control all the relations of economic life in the public interest gave a new character to the morality of industrial and commercial life. It ceased to be entirely concerned with a man's personal relations, and his personal connections, and came to be more a matter of loyal acceptance of the course projected in the public good. In its ultimate effect this change was wholly bad. The Stewarts failed to secure respect for their efforts to promote the public good; and, in the time of Adam Smith, the merchant who professed to trade in the public interest was, apparently, an object of some suspicion. When this new criterion of honourable dealing was entirely abandoned, there was neither tradition nor principle available for the maintenance of disinterested business morality, and the course of deliberately pursuing individual interest came to have defenders and, indeed, to be idealised. At least, we may see that the defenders of the old morality, who appeared to be mere pedants, were right in thinking that the new morality, which was coming in, was built on insecure foundations. The chief question of dispute was as to the terms on which capital might rightly be lent. According to the old ecclesiastical tradition, which is embodied in the 109th canon of 1604, it was wrong to bargain for any payment for certain for the use of a principal sum. The man who had borrowed it might fail to make money with it; and, therefore, though the lender was justified in Business Morality 313 requiring the return of the principal, and even in bargaining for a share of the profit if any accrued, he had no right to ask for a certain gain, or to put himself in the position of gaining at the expense of another. But in the conditions of extending business which were current in the latter part of the sixteenth, and the first half of the seventeenth, century, it was desirable, in the public interest, that hoards of money should be brought into play and used as capital in agriculture, industry or trade. In order that this might be done as easily as possible, the practice of lending money on moderate interest came into vogue, and it could be certainly argued that, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, or in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, the merchant who borrowed at what was regarded as low interest, say, six per cent., was able to pay this interest easily and make a considerable gain for himself, while the lender got interest on money that would have been otherwise unremunerative. Henceforward, the term usury came to be applied to excessive interest, where an element of extortion might be supposed to come in; but city men generally had no scruple about the giving or taking of moderate interest as likely to land them in harsh or unneighbourly conduct. The purists, the most remarkable of whom was Thomas Wilson, whose treatise was published in 1576, and who was followed by Fenton and many of the clergy, condemned what we now call lending money on interest as a wrong bargain for a man to make, since it might render him subject to the temptation of extortion. Malynes, and the English public generally, insisted that moderate interest, which gave free play to capital, was for the public good, and that harm only arose when excessive rates were charged. This was the view which was adopted by parliament in 1624; the new commercial morality was accepted by the state, and the efforts of churchmen to maintain the old standard soon fell into abeyance. In a somewhat similar fashion, the duty of paying a fair day's wage for a fair day's work had been, to a large extent, a personal thing, though the obligation, doubtless, was limited by gild rules and manorial customs; but, after the statute of 1562, when an elaborate machinery was set up for regulating the proper rates of wages and providing for their necessary variation, the duty of considering what was fair and right almost ceased to be personal and became official, and the conscientious employer might be satisfied if he paid the rates as authoritatively fixed by statute. In that age, the personal kindness of an employer towards his hands took the form of continuing to give them employment at times when the markets were bad and work was unremunerative. It was to this course that clothiers, in times of interrupted trade, were urged by Wolsey, and by other statesmen who held that capitalists, since they carried on their business under the protection of the state and obtained a market through royal alliances, were not at liberty, in their own private interest, to dismiss their hands and thus to render their unemployed workmen desperate and liable to break out into riot. In the Elizabethan period, attempts were also made to substitute public organisation for private benevolence in the relief of the poor. By seeking to take over the care of the poor, the state may be said to have condemned the spasmodic efforts of personal charity as insufficient, and to have attempted organised relief which rendered them unnecessary. The problem of pauperism had assumed enormous proportions, both in town and country, in the early part of the sixteenth century; and the dissolution of the monasteries and the breaking up of religious houses had, at all events, helped to render the evil more patent. The Supplication for the beggars is an instructive picture of the variety of mendicants who were to be met with before affairs reached their worst'. The drastic measures of Edward VI were insufficient; but it appears that the administration of Elizabethan laws, coupled with the efforts that were made to introduce new industries, and especially with the wide diffusion of spinning as a domestic art, caused an enormous improvement in many parts of the country before the civil war broke out. There is much interesting writing in this period on the causes of poverty and on the best means of meeting it. We hear both from Devonshire and Wiltshire of fluctuations in the clothing trade as the main causes of distress, while there was also a tendency to attribute it to the introduction of pasture farming and the enclosure of commons; others urged that the squatters on the commons were the most usual source of mischief, and that greater stringency in dealing with them was essential if the problem was to be tackled. The charitable spirit, indeed, was not dead, and, during the early part of the seventeenth century, a very large number of parochial benefactions were founded for the teaching of children, for apprenticing boys or enabling them to start in business and for the care of the aged. But, on the whole, the relief of the poor was coming to be thought of more and more as a duty that was to be exercised through public channels and not by personal gifts. How far this machinery could have continued 1 Cf. also vol. II of the present work, chap. v. The Mercantile System 315 to serve its purpose may be doubtful; but, at all events, the disorder which was caused by the outbreak of the civil war put an end to the centralisation on which its efficiency depended; many years were to elapse, and many local abuses to arise, before the various factors could be once more co-ordinated in the pursuit of a common policy throughout the realm. The early seventeenth century was a period of transition, when the power of capital was beginning to make itself felt in many directions. There was great difficulty in finding any practical reconciliation of the aims of maintaining the social stability on which comfort depends, and yet of giving sufficient scope for progress and change. The storm which broke out in the civil war was the most obvious result of the efforts of the Stewarts to exercise a mediating influence, and to organise a well-ordered system of industry and trade. Eventually, the interplay and conscious interdependence of interests in all parts of the country in carrying out the common object of building up a national mercantile marine gave cohesion to the economic activities of the realm, but this was effected by the parliaments of the Restoration period and of the Whig ascendancy, not through the personal government of the crown. Patriotic sentiment found satisfaction in the success of the efforts to develop material resources of every kind, and to render them conducive to national power. CHAPTER XVI LONDON AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF POPULAR LITERATURE CHARACTER WRITING. SATIRE. THE ESSAY SINCE the collapse of feudalism, London had become the centre of political power in England, and the nobility tended more and more to abandon their estates and frequent the court, where preferment was to be won. But, since the fall of Antwerp (1576), London had also established itself as the capital of European commerce, to which all nationalities crowded in search of wealth. Thus, the rich men of the upper, as well as the middle class were gradually being gathered into one city where, for want of other investments, their wealth was converted into gold plate, jewellery and rich apparel, till London became the city of fastastic costumes and extravagant ostentation. With its cosmopolitan population and foreign imports, London soon inspired the desire for travel; and Italy, the cradle of the renascence and the school of courtesy, became the goal of all voyagers. But Italy was also the home of immorality and intrigue, and northerners brought back to their own country the cynical curiosity and the ribald insincerity of the south. The centre of wealth and commerce is, also, the centre of civilisation, and the sons of rich men, whether nobles or farmers, came to London to avail themselves of its opportunities. These young men, though nominally students of law, attendants at court, or professional soldiers, formed a new and disturbing element in society. They affected a cult of modernity in which literary dilettantism and a false sense of honour combined with contempt for English traditions and indulgence in all forms of dissipation. These gilded vagabonds crowded places of public resort, introduced new fashions, cultivated foreign vices and even made their influence felt in current literature. But they achieved more lasting harm by calling into existence a class of unscrupulous |