When he enforced the resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once of Edmund Burke and English radicalism were born; for the Present Discontents and the Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights are the dawn of a splendid recovery.

And they made possible the speculative ferment which showed that England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and Rousseau.

Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the Tudor despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the complacency of the eighteenth century.

But the peace of the Tudors was the death-bed of the Stuarts; and it was the stagnant optimism of the early eighteenth century which made possible the birth of democratic England.

He announced the advent of the modern system of parliamentary government; and from his time the debate has been rather of the conditions under which it is to work, than of the foundations upon which it is based.

The great debate inaugurated by the Reformation ceased when Locke had outlined an intelligible basis for parliamentary government.

Burke, indeed, toward the latter part of his life, awoke to the realization that men were dissatisfied with the traditional substance of the State.

But he met the new desires with hate instead of understanding, and the Napoleonic wars drove the current of democratic opinion underground.

The advance of English politics in the preceding two centuries was mainly an advance of structure; yet relative at least to continental fact, it appeared liberal enough to hide the disharmonies of its inner content.

The conditions of change lay implicit in the Industrial Revolution, when a new class of men attained control of the nation's economic power.

The political ideas of the eighteenth century are thus in some sort a comment upon the system established by the Revolution; and that is, in its turn, the product of the struggle between Parliament and Crown in the preceding age.

Politics, as Seeley said, are vulgar unless they are liberalized by history; and a state which failed to see itself as a mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its novelties upon foundations of sand.

Suspicions of collective effort in the eighteenth century ought not to mean suspicion in the twentieth; to think in such fashion is to fall into the error for which Lassalle so finely criticized Hegel.

It is as though one were to confound the accidental phases of the history of property with the philosophic basis of property itself.

From such an error it is the task of history above all to free us.

For it records the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as a perennial challenge to the coming time.

The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the double tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth.

With Ricardo, the elder Mill and Nassau Senior, the main preoccupation is the production of wealth without regard to its moral environment; and the state for them is merely an engine to protect the atmosphere in which business men achieve…

There is nothing in them of that fine despair which made Stuart Mill welcome socialism itself rather than allow the continuance of the new capitalist system.

Herein the State is purged of moral purpose; and the utilitarian method achieves the greatest happiness by insisting that the technique of production must dominate all other circumstances.

But it was discovered impossible to act any longer upon the assumptions of the abstract economic man.

The infallible sense of his own interest was discovered to be without basis in the facts for the simple reason that the instruments of his perception obviously required training if they were to be applied to a complex world.

Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense, passed away because it failed to build a State wherein a channel of expression might be found for the creative energies of humble men.

It is only within the last two decades that we have begun to understand the inner significance of the protest against this economic liberalism.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.