THE END OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE

Malthus, Cobbett and Huskisson, Bentham and Coleridge, Darwin and the Bishop ofOxford, were all, it was discovered, preachingpractically the same thing—Individualism andlaissez-faire. This was the Church of England and those her apostles, whilst the companyof the economists were there to prove that theleast deviation into impiety involved financialruin.

These reasons and this atmosphere are theexplanations, whether we know it or not—and most of us in these degenerate days arelargely ignorant in the matter—why we feelsuch a strong bias in favour of laissez-faire ,and why State action to regulate the value ofmoney, or the course of investment, or thepopulation, provoke such passionate suspicionsin many upright breasts. We have notread these authors; we should consider theirarguments preposterous if they were to fallinto our hands. Nevertheless we should not,I fancy, think as we do, if Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Paley, Adam Smith, Bentham, and Miss Martineau had not thought!5