In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, enlightened men and women welcomed the new order— notwithstanding their misgivings about the acquisitive impulse and the probability that it would extinguish the virtues of fortitude and self‐ sacrince—on the grounds that economic abundance gave mankind mastery over its own destiny and broke the age-old cycle of growth and decline, formerly the fate of nations. They had other reasons to celebrate the growth of commerce. If merchants were the "most useful race of men in the whole society," as Hume called them, it was because their activities broke down the "narrow malignity and envy of nations, which can never bear to see their neighbors thriving, but continually repine at any new

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