ABSTRACT
THE eighteenth century was the age of political arithmetic.It is true that it was the age of much more than this: ofreason and toleration, Newtonian cosmography, Palladian architecture, wit, good taste, and good manners. But, viewed through the narrow window of the economic historian, it was an age when interests were directed largely to things that could be measured and weighed and calculated. If men may be judged by their utterances, the educated no longer troubled their minds over-much with high matters of doctrine and polity: they were exercised less with the purpose of life than with the art of getting a living, less with the nature of the state than with the means of increasing its opulence. In 1700 there were fewer men searching the Scriptures and bearing arms than there had been fifty years earlier, and more men bent over ledgers and busying themselves with cargoes. There were fewer prophets and more projectors, fewer saints and more political economists. And these economists were concerned less with principles of universal application than with precepts derived from experience, less with what was ultimately to be wished for than with what was immediately expedient.
