Principles of western civilisation

364 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

resulted in the establishment of the principles of free-trade in England, discussed as if it sprang simply from the conscious and organised effort of parties and interests in the State to further their own selfish ends. Like nearly every other movement in our civilisation it has become in its turn, as we shall see in the next chapter, deeply involved in the toils of the ascendant present. But in that phase in which it represented the attempt in England to break the rule of the feudal past in the economic process in society, the springs of its life came from a cause deeper, more far-reaching, and more elemental than class-selfishness. So true is this, that it is almost startling to be reminded at the present day that Adam Smith, the formulator of the free-trade doctrine in England, regarded the interests against it as so general, so powerful, and so determined, that he despaired of their resistance ever being overcome, and that he declared that “to expect that the doctrine would ever become a practice in the United Kingdom was as absurd as to expect the establishment of a Utopia.”* The forces behind the forward movement in England eventually bore down all opposition before them. But they were forces proceeding from a cause far more radical than any conscious theory of interests in the State. They were the forces of which we catch sight in Morley’s description of Bright and Cobden in the midst of the agitation in England as presenting a spectacle which had about it something of the

1 Even in studies like those of Professor Davidson’s, of the trade relations between England and her colonies, we may distinguish something of this spirit.

Cf. ‘* England’s Commercial Policy towards her Colonies since the Treaty of Paris,” Polttical Science Quarterly, vol. xiv.

* ** The Manchester School,” Dre?. of Political Economy, vol. ii.

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