Harold J. Laski

Mercantilism, by the time of Locke, is not the simple error that wealth consists in bullion but the insistence that the balance of trade must be preserved.

The State became the servant of the individual from being his master; and service became equated with an internal policy of laissez-faire.

They had no thought of sacrificing themselves to an institution which they had much ground for thinking existed only for their torment.

Liberty becomes their realization; and the object of the State is to enable men in the fullest sense to secure the satisfaction of their private wants.

The organic society of the middle ages gives place to an individual who builds the State out of his own desires.

Hobbes built his state upon the selfishness of men; even Locke makes the individual enter political life for the benefits that accrue therefrom.

In the result the State becomes dissolved into a discrete mass of individuals, and the self-interest of each is the starting-point of all inquiry.

The hostility of the English landowners to the commercial classes in the eighteenth century is at bottom the inheritance of religious antagonism.

Success in business, indeed, became for many a test of religious grace, and poverty the proof of God's disfavor.

The greater the energy of its performance, the greater the likelihood of prosperity; and thence it is but a step to argue that the free development of a man's industrial worth is the law of God.

Freedom in economic matters, like freedom in religion, came rapidly to mean permission that diversity shall exist; and economic diversity soon came to mean free competition.

The movement for ecclesiastical freedom in England, moreover, became causally linked with that protest against the system of monopolies with which it was the habit of the court to reward its favorites.

What the Nonconformists wanted was to be left alone; and Davenant explained the root of their desire when he tells of the gaols crowded with substantial tradesmen whose imprisonment spelt unemployment for thousands of workmen.

Nothing, indeed, is more important in the history of English political philosophy than to realize that from Stuart times the Nonconformists were deeply bitten with distrust of government.

When the roots of religious freedom had been secured, it was easy for them to transfer their argument to the secular sphere.

The movement for religious toleration is not only paralleled in the next century by the movement for economic freedom, but is itself in a real sense the parent of the latter.

Alongside the discoveries of Hargreaves and Crompton, the ideas of Hume and Adam Smith shifted the whole perspective of men's minds.

The Industrial Revolution is hardly less a fundamental change in the habits of English thought than in the technique of commercial production.

When he came to the House of Commons, the prospects of representative government were very dark; and it is mainly to his emphasis upon its virtues that its victory must be attributed.

He showed also that allegiance to party is never inconsistent with the deeper allegiance to the demand of conscience.

He showed that government by discussion can be made to illuminate great principles.

He illustrates at its best the value of that party-system the worth of which made so deep an impression on all he wrote.

Yet, when the last word of criticism has been made, the balance of illumination is immense.

His flashes of insight are things that go, as few men have ever gone, into the hidden deeps of political complexity.

He brought to the political philosophy of his generation a sense of its direction, a lofty vigour of purpose, and a full knowledge of its complexity, such as no other statesman has ever possessed.