Principles of western civilisation

XI TOWARDS THE FUTURE 415

altogether from the theories of free-trade and free exchange. In its simplest and most scientific form it might be put as follows: It was held to be the natural and ultimate tendency in the existing world for the conditions in industry, commerce, and business, just as in the relations of capital to labour, to reach their highest and most efficient development in the interest of society, simply in obedience to their own natural and inherent tendencies.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, when industry and commerce were still suffering from the policy of governments avaricious on behalf of classes or of interests, it was only natural that the most enlightened minds should advance to the conclusion that all interference of the State, as in the past, was an unmixed evil. In the writings of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and the Mills, and in the speeches of Cobden, we are always in the presence of the feeling associated with this fact. It was the officers who sit at the receipt of custom to take tithe and toll for the benefit of particular classes that excited the anger of Cobden.! It was but a step which involved a scarcely perceptible advance farther to imagine, and to assert with conviction, not only that industry and business best attained, unaided by the State, the ends desired by traders, but that they tended, as was conceived of the relations of capital to labour, to reach their highest and most efficient development in the interest of society, simply in obedience to their own tendencies, in that condition which allowed of the uncontrolled competition of all rival interests.

As we watch the next phase unfolding itself in

1 Speeches, p. 41.