The Worldly Philosophers
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One hundred and twenty-five years had now passed since The Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, and in that span of time it seemed as if the great economists had left no aspect of the world unexamined: its magnificence or its squalor, its naïveté or its sometimes sinister overtones, its grandiose achievements in technology or its often mean shortcomings in human values. But this many-sided world, with its dozens of differing interpretations, had nonetheless one common factor. It was European. For all its changing social complexion, this was still the Old World, and as such it insisted on a modicum of punctilio.
Thus it was not without significance that when Dick Arkwright, the barber's apprentice, made his fortune in the spinning jenny he metamorphosed into Sir Richard; the threat to England's traditional reign of gentlemanliness was nicely solved by inducting such parvenus wholesale into the fraternity of gentle blood and manners. The parvenus, it is true, brought with them a train of middle-class attitudes and even a strain of antiaristocratic sentiment, but they brought with them, as well, the sneaking knowledge that there was a higher social stratum than that attainable by wealth alone. As countless comedies of manners testified, there was a difference between the beer baron, with all his millions and his purchased crest, and the impoverished but. . .