Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/364

Rh 348 POLITICAL ECONOMY plete regulation of human life in all its departments on the basis of this transmitted body of practical ideas. Conserva tion is the principal task of this social order, and its most remarkable quality is stability, which tends to degenerate into stagnation. But there can be no doubt that the useful arts were long, though slowly, progressive under this regime, from which they were inherited by the later civilizations, the system of classes or castes maintaining the degree of division of labour which had been reached in those early periods. The eminent members of the corporations which presided over the theocracies without doubt gave much earnest thought to the conduct of industry, which, unlike war, did not imperil their political pre-eminence by deve loping a rival class. But, conceiving life as a whole, and making its regulation their primary aim, they naturally considered most the social reactions which industry is fitted to exercise. The moral side of economics is the one they habitually contemplate, or (what is not the same) the economic side of morals. They abound in those warnings against greed and the haste to be rich which religion and philosophy have in all ages seen to be necessary. They insist on honesty in mutual dealings, on just weights and measures, on the faithful observance of contracts. They admonish against the pride and arrogance apt to be gene rated by riches, against undue prodigality and self-indulg ence, and enforce the duties of justice and beneficence towards servants and inferiors. Whilst, in accordance with the theological spirit, the personal acquisition of wealth is in general thesis represented as determined by divine wills, its dependence on individual diligence and thrift is emphatically taught. There is indeed in the fully developed theocratic systems a tendency to carry precept, which there differs little from command, to an excessive degree of minuteness, to prescribe in detail the time, the mode, and the accompaniments of almost every act of. every member of the community. This system of exaggerated surveillance is connected with the union, or rather confusion, of the spiritual and temporal powers, whence it results that many parts of the government of society are conducted by direct injunction or restraint, which at a later stage are intrusted to general intellectual and moral influences. Greek and Roman Antiquity. The practical economic enterprises of Greek and Roman antiquity could not, even independently of any special adverse influences, have com peted in magnitude of scale or variety of resource with those of modern times. The unadvanced condition of physical science prevented a large application of the less obvious natural powers to production, or the extensive use of machinery, which has acquired such an immense development as a factor in modern industry. The imper fection of geographical knowledge and of the means of communication and transport were impediments to the growth of foreign commerce. These obstacles arose neces sarily out of the mere immaturity of the industrial life of the periods in question. But more deeply rooted impedi ments to a vigorous and expansive economic practical system existed in the characteristic principles of the civi lization of antiquity. Some writers have attempted to set aside the distinction between the ancient and modern worlds as imaginary or unimportant, and, whilst admitting the broad separation between ourselves and the theocratic peoples of the East, to represent the Greeks and Romans as standing on a substantially similar ground of thought, feeling, and action with the Western populations of our own time. But this is a serious error, arising from the same too exclusive preoccupation with the cultivated classes and with the mere speculative intellect which has often led to an undue disparagement of the Middle Ages. There is this essential difference between the spirit and life of ancient and of modern communities, that the former were organized for war, the latter during their whole history have increasingly tended to be organized for industry, as their practical end and aim. The profound influence of these differing conditions on every form of human activity must never be overlooked or forgotten. With the military constitution of ancient societies the institution of slavery was essentially connected. Far from being an excrescence on the contemporary system of life, as it was in the modern West Indies or the United States of America, it was so entirely in harmony with that life that the most eminent thinkers regarded it as no less indispensable than inevitable. It does, indeed, seem to have been a temporary necessity, and on the whole, regard being had to what might have taken its place, a relative good. But it was attended with manifold evils. It led to the prevalence amongst the citizen class of a contempt for industrial occupations ; every form of production, with a partial exception in favour of agriculture, was branded as unworthy of a free man, the only noble forms of activity being those directly connected with public life, whether military or administrative. Labour was degraded by the relegation of most departments of it to the servile class, above whom the free artisans were but little elevated in general esteem. The agents of production, being for the most part destitute of intellectual cultivation and excluded from any share in civic ideas, interests, or efforts, w r ere unfitted in character as well as by position for the habits of skilful combination and vigorous initiation which the progress of industry demands. To this must be added that the comparative insecurity of life and pro perty arising out of military habits, and the consequent risks which attended accumulation, were grave obstructions to the formation of large capitals, and to the establishment of an effective system of credit. These causes conspired with the undeveloped state of knowledge and of social relations in giving to the economic life of the ancients the limitation and monotony which contrast so strongly with the inexhaustible resource, the ceaseless expansion, and the thousandfold variety of the same activities in the modern world. It is, of course, absurd to expect incom patible qualities in any social system ; each system must be estimated according to the work it has to do. Now the historical vocation of the ancient civilization was to be accomplished, not through industry, but through war, which was in the end to create a condition of things admitting of its own elimination and of the foundation of a regime based on pacific activity. The Greeks. This office was, however, reserved for Rome, as the final result of her system of conquest ; the military activity of Greece, though continuous, was inco herent and sterile, except in the defence against Persia, and did not issue in the accomplishment of any such social mission. It was, doubtless, the inadequacy of the warrior life, under these conditions, to absorb the faculties of the race, that threw the energies of its most eminent members into the channel of intellectual activity, and produced a singularly rapid evolution of the aesthetic, philosophic, and scientific germs transmitted by the theocratic societies. In the Works and Days of Hesiod, we find an order of thinking in the economic sphere very similar to that of the theocracies. With a recognition of the divine disposing power, and traditional rules of sacerdotal origin, is com bined practical sagacity embodied in precept or proverbial saying. But the development of abstract thought, begin ning from the time of Thales, soon gives to Greek culture its characteristic form, and marks a new epoch in the intel lectual history of mankind. The movement was now begun, destined to mould the whole future of humanity, which, gradually sapping the