of wage labor, neither can he be seen as its ardent exponent. He had little to say about wages, pro or con. He lived in a world in which capitalist relations of production had not yet established themselves on a wide scale. When he sang the praises of honest labor, both the wage earner and the capitalist were missing from his field of vision, as Tully notes, "along with the landowner and master," none of whom contributed anything substantial, in Locke's opinion, to the wealth of society. From Locke's point of view, as Tully makes clear, "the ploughman, reaper, thresher, baker, oven-breaker, planter, tiller, logger, miller, shipbuilder, clothmaker and tanner alone make things useful to the life of man and create value."

Recent scholarship pictures Locke as a thinker who appreciated the effects of trade and commerce in raising the standard of living but distrusted "luxury" and "covetousness." The same thing can be said of other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century liberals. The point is not that early liberals were republicans at heart or that republicanism furnished the only coherent frame of political discourse. The point is that the friends of commerce, at this early point in its development, perceived many of its undesirable effects as well as its benefits. Liberals thought they could dispense with civic virtue, but they could not dispense with enlightened self-interest; and the pursuit of wealth, they knew, could easily lead people to sacrifice long-term interests to the pleasures of the moment. Even those who believed, in opposition to the republican tradition, that "the end of every individual is its own private good," as Richard Jackson wrote to Benjamin Franklin in 1755, could not fail to notice that "luxury and corruption ... seem the inseparable companions of commerce and the arts." Jackson admitted that "commerce is at this day almost the only stimulus that forces every one to contribute a share of labour for the public benefit." He regarded commerce as a mixed blessing, however; if it encouraged enterprise, it also released uncontrollable forces and led men to think that "every thing should have its price." That commerce "softens and enervates the manners" was not a point in its favor, in Jackson's eyes. "Steady virtue, and unbending integrity, are seldom to be found where a spirit of commerce pervades every thing." Like Adam Smith, Jackson believed that only education could "stem the torrent" and bring about a "reconciliation between disinterestedness and commerce."

In America, the economics of an emergent nationalism reinforced mis

-201-