If we bear in mind Smith’s criticism of Hutcheson and Mandeville in adjoining chapters of the Moral Sentiments , and remember further that he must almost certainly have become acquainted with the Fable of the Bees when attending Hutcheson’s lectures or soon afterwards, we can scarcely fail to suspect that it was Mandeville who first made him realise that “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” Treating the word “vice” as a mistake for self-love, Adam Smith could have repeated with cordiality Mandeville’s lines already quoted:—
“Thus vice nursed ingenuity, Which join’d with time and industry, Had carry’d life’s conveniencies, It’s real pleasures, comforts, ease, To such a height, the very poor Lived better than the rich before.”
Smith put the doggerel into prose, and added something from the Hutchesonian love of liberty when he propounded what is really the text of the polemical portion of the Wealth of Nations :—
“The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition, when suffered to exert itself with freedom and security, is so powerful a principle, that it is alone and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations.”
Experience shows that a general belief in the beneficence of the economic working of self-interest is not always sufficient to make even a person of