THE END OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE

so-called Manchester School and of. theBenthamite Utilitarians, the utterances ofsecondary economic authorities, and theeducational stories of Miss Martineau andMrs Marcet , that fixed laissez-faire in thepopular mind as the practical conclusion oforthodox Political Economy—with this greatdifference, that the Malthusian view ofPopulation having been accepted in the mean-time by this same school of thought, theoptimistic laissez-faire of the last half of theeighteenth century gives place to the pessi-mistic laissez-faire of the first half of thenineteenth century. 1

In Mrs Marcet ’s Conversations on PoliticalEconomy (1817) Caroline stands out as long asshe can in favour of controlling the expenditure

1 Cf. Sidgwick (op. cit., p. 22) : “ Even those econ-omists, who adhered in the main to Adam Smith ’slimitations of the sphere of government, enforced theselimitations sadly rather than triumphantly; not asadmirers of the social order at present resulting from‘ natural liberty,’ but as convinced that it is at leastpreferable to any artificial order that government mightbe able to substitute for it.”

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