e common good than in the
limited satisfaction of his narrow desire for material advancement. And
that, indeed, is the starting-point of modern effort. Our liberty means
the consistent expression of our personality in media where we find
people like-minded with ourselves in their conception of social life.
The very scale of civilization implies collective plans and common
effort. The constant revision of our basic notions was inevitable
immediately science was applied to industry. There was thus no reason to
believe that the system of individual interests for which Smith stood
sponsor was more likely to fit requirements of a new time than one which
implied the national regulation of business enterprise. The danger in
every period of history is lest we take our own age as the term in
institutional evolution. Private enterprise has the sanction of
prescription; but since the Industrial Revolution the chief lesson we
have had to learn is the unsatisfactory character of that title. History
is an unenviable record of bad metaphysics used to defend obsolete
systems. It took almost a century after the publication of the _Wealth
of Nations_ for men to realize that its axioms represented the
experience of a definite time. Smith thought of freedom in the terms
most suitable to his generation and stated them with a largeness of view
which remains impressive even at a century's distance.

But nothing is more certain in the history of political philosophy than
that the problem of freedom changes with each age. The nineteenth
century sought release from political privilege; and it built its
success upon the system prepared by its predecessor. It can never be too
greatly emphasized that in each age the substance of liberty will be
found in what the dominating forces of that age most greatly want. With
Locke, with Smith, with Hegel and with Marx, the ultimate hypothesis is
always the summary of some special experience universalized. That does
not mean that the past is worthless. Politics, as Seeley said, are
vulgar unless they are liberalized by history; and a state which failed
to see itself as a mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its
novelties upon foundations of sand. Suspicions of collective effort in
the eighteenth century ought not to mean suspicion in the twentieth; to
think in such fashion is to fall into the error for which Lassalle so
finely criticized Hegel. It is as though one were to confound the
accidental phase