THE END OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE

intellectual foundation to the rights ofproperty and to the liberty of the individualin possession to do what he liked with himselfand with his own. This was one of the con-tributions of the eighteenth century to the airwe still breathe.

The purpose of promoting the Individualwas to depose the Monarch and the Church;the effect—through the new ethical signifi-cance attributed to Contract—was to buttressProperty and Prescription. But it was notlong before the claims of Society raised them-selves anew against the individual. Paley andBentham accepted utilitarian hedonism 1 fromthe hands of Hume and his predecessors, butenlarged it into social utility. Rousseau tookthe Social Contract from Locke and drew out

1 “ I omit,” says Archdeacon Paley, “ much usualdeclamation upon the dignity and capacity of our nature,the superiority of the soul to the body, of the rational tothe animal part of our constitution ; upon the worthi-ness, refinement, and delicacy of some satisfactions, andthe meanness, grossness, and sensuality of others : becauseI hold that pleasures differ in nothing but in continuanceand intensity .”—Principles of Moral and Political Philo-sophy, Bk. I, chap. 6.

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