shirt made from the "most ordinary Yorkshire cloth," according to Mandeville, would have been considered a luxury in earlier times, when man "fed on the fruits of the earth ... and reposed himself naked like the other animals on the lap of the common parent." Envy, pride, and ambition made human beings want more than they needed, but these "private vices" became "public virtues" by stimulating industry and invention. Thrift and self-denial, on the other hand, meant economic stagnation.

Hume and Smith rejected Mandeville's "licentious system of morality," really an inverted asceticism, as Smith astutely pointed out, in which anything "short of the most ascetic abstinence" became "gross luxury and sensuality, ... so that there is vice even in the use of a clean shirt." But they sided with Mandeville in opposing the "received notion," as Mandeville put it, "that luxury is as destructive to the wealth of the whole body politic, as it is to that of every individual person who is guilty of it." The "pleasures of luxury and the profit of commerce," according to Hume, "roused men from their indolence" and led to "further improvements in every branch of domestic as well as foreign trade." Hume and Smith endorsed the general principle that a growing desire for material comforts, wrongly taken by republicans as a sign of decadence and impending social collapse, generated new employments, new wealth, and a constantly rising level of productivity. They quarreled only with Mandeville's moral condemnation of "luxury." If luxury meant a "great refinement in the gratification of the senses," there was a good deal to be said for it, Hume argued, on moral as well as on economic grounds. "Indulgences are only vices, when they are pursued at the expense of some virtue."

Smith made the more important point that it was not "luxury," after all, that fueled the modern productive machine but the more modest expenditures of ordinary consumers. Mandeville did not see beyond the extravagant self-indulgence of the rich, which had the happy though entirely unintended consequence of employing "all sorts of artificers in iron, wood, marble, brass, pewter, copper, wool, flax, and divers other materials." Smith, on the other hand, insisted that the "uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition"— not the lavish but unproductive spending of kings and nobles—was the "principle from which public and national, as well as private opulence is originally derived." Unlike Mandeville, who shared the mercantilist prej

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