The recent preoccupation with republicanism has muddled the history of opposition to "improvement" in two ways: by identifying republicanism as the only source of that opposition, thereby obscuring the contribution of other traditions, including liberalism itself; and by identifying "corruption" and the credit system as the only object of criticism. Recent historical scholarship is curiously silent about the widespread opposition to wage labor in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps because it was influenced more directly by Lockean liberalism (though not by "Lockean liberalism" as conceived by Hartz and Macpherson) than by the ideology of civic humanism. Yet the general uneasiness about the new economic order found its most striking expression in the nearly universal condemnation of wage labor.

Langton Byllesby, a Philadelphia printer, argued in 1826 that wage labor, which destroyed the "option whether to labour or not," was the "very essence of slavery." The division of labor impoverished artisans, Byllesby said, "for every improvement in the arts tending to reduce the value of the labour necessary to produce them, must inevitably have the effect of increasing the value and power of wealth in the hands of those who may be fortuitously possessed of it." In 1834, the General Trades' Union of New York declared, "In proportion as the line of distinction between the employer and the employed is widened, the condition of the latter inevitably verges toward a system of vassalage." Such statements recall Locke's argument that anyone forced by necessity to sell his labor lacked one of the essential attributes of freedom. As Mike Walsh put it, "No man devoid of all other means of support but that which his labor affords him can be a freeman, under the present state of society. He must be a humble slave of capital."

Walsh, a Democratic party politician, spoke in the I840s for New York's artisans; but those who spoke for the manufacturing interest in America took the same position. They could stomach credit and corporations, but they gagged on wage labor. Both Henry Carey and Daniel Raymond, prominent Whig economists, criticized the "English school" of political economy, associated with Adam Smith, on the grounds that it

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