Employers, in his picture, are little capable of benevolence or charity.

Their rule is the law of supply and demand and not the Sermon on the Mount.

They combine without hesitation to depress wages to the lowest point of subsistence.
They seize every occasion of commercial misfortune to make better terms for themselves; and the greater the poverty the more submissive do servants become so that scarcity is naturally regarded as more favorable to industry.
Obviously enough, the inner hinge of all this argument is Smith's conception of nature.

Nor can there be much doubt of what he thought its inner substance.

Facile distinctions such as the effort of Buckle to show that while in the _Moral Sentiments_ Adam Smith was dealing with the unselfish side of man's nature, in the _Wealth of Nations_ he was dealing with a group of facts which required the abstraction of such altruistic elements, are really beside the point.