destined to be confined to a shadowy half-life on the fringes of debate so long as the economic and technological advantages of specialization—the central assumption in the ensuing controversy about industrialism and the industrial division of labor—went uncontested. If one conceded the "irresistible superiority" of a "well-regulated standing army" over a citizens' militia, the question of whether "justice and humanity" represented a fatting-off from self-command, fortitude, contempt of pain, and "independency upon fortune" became entirely academic. One might regret the passing of the "great and awful virtues" appropriate to the "council, the senate, or the field," but the issue was already decided by the inexorable advance of civilization. "In general, the style of manners which takes place in any nation, may ... be said to be that which is most suitable to its situation. Hardiness is the character most suitable to the circumstances of a savage, sensibility to those of one who lives in a very civilized society."

So saying, Smith effectively banished regrets, including his own, to the category of harmless speculation about a hypothetical golden age in the past. No one could argue very long against abundance, increasingly perceived as the distinguishing characteristic of a "very civilized society." By I848, when Macaulay published his History of England, the party of progress, confident that it had long since carried the day, had mastered the tone of bluff and jocular dismissal, the unapologetically philistine defense of everyday comforts, the pretense of standing out against the prevailing intellectual fashion of sentimental regret, that have remained its trademark down to the present day.

It is now the fashion to place the Golden Age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves, the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana. We too, shall, in our turn, be outstripped, and in our turn envied.

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