The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
most powerful plastic elements of national character, and contain a law of development and a compelling force entirely their own. Moreover, the most important differences, so far as non-religious factors play a part, are, as with Lutheranism and Calvinism, the result of political circumstances, not economic.
85. That is what Eduard Bernstein means to express when he says, in the essay referred to above (pp. 625, 681), "Asceticism is a bourgeois virtue." His discussion is the first which has suggested these important relationships. But the connection is a much wider one than he suspected. For not only the accumulation of capital, but the ascetic rationalization of the whole of economic life was involved.
For the American Colonies, the difference between the Puritan North, where, on account of the ascetic compulsion to save, capital in search of investment was always available, from the conditions in the South has already been clearly brought out by Doyle.
86. Doyle, The English in America, II, chap. i. The existence of iron-works (1643), weaving for the market (1659), and also the high development of the handicrafts in New England in the first generation after the foundation of the colonies are, from a purely economic view-point, astounding. They are in striking contrast to the conditions in the South, as well as the non-Cälvinistic Rhode Island with its complete freedom of conscience. There, in spite of the excellent harbour, the report of the Governor and Council of 1686 said: "The great obstruction concerning trade is the want of merchants and men of considerable estates amongst us" (Arnold, History of the State of Rhode Island, p. 490). It can in fact hardly be doubted that the compulsion continually to reinvest savings, which the Puritan curtailment of consumption exercised, played a part. In addition there was the part of Church discipline which cannot be discussed here.
87. That, however, these circles rapidly diminished in the Netherlands is shown by Busken-Huet's discussion (op. cit., II, chaps, iii and iv). Nevertheless, Groen van Prinsterer says (Handb. der Gesch. van het Vaderland, third edition, par. 303, note, p. 254), "De Nederlanders verkoopen veel en verbruiken wenig", even of the time after the Peace of Westphalia.
88. For England, for instance, a petition of an aristocratic Royalist (quoted in Ranke, Engl. Geschichte, IV, p. 197) presented after the entry of Charles II into London, advocated a legal prohibition of the acquisition of landed estates by bourgeois capital, which should thereby be forced to find employment in trade. The class of Dutch regents was distinguished as an estate from the bourgeois patricians of the cities by the purchase of landed estates. See the complaints, cited by Fruin, Tien jaren uit den tachtigjarigen oorlog, of the year 1652, that the regents have become landlords and are no longer merchants. To be sure these circles had never been at bottom strictly
