ine of the natural rights of the individual fatal to
all types of government. Similarly the political theory of Adam Smith
and the _laissez-faire_ economists, together with that of their
contemporaries, Bentham and the utilitarian philosophers, not only
attacked the restrictive regulations of the Whig oligarchy, but showed
on general principles the strongest dislike of what it called "State
interference" in all circumstances. So, too, Herbert Spencer and the
nineteenth century school of scientific individualists not only
demonstrated (as they did with extraordinary pungency and success) the
extreme folly and incompetence of the main government departments of
their own day; they also sought to establish the eternal and inevitable
antagonism of Man versus the State, and to limit universally the
functions of government to the irreducible minimum.

This attitude of hostility, however, ceased to have its old
justification with the advent of democracy. The Reform Acts of 1832,
1867, and 1884 have so enlarged the electorate as to convert government
into something approaching self-government, and the State has become the
organized form of democracy itself. Hence the individualism of Milton,
Adam Smith, Bentham, and Spencer is an anachronism. It is not
remarkable, then, that, following Parliamentary Reform, the idea of the
State revived in Britain with new force and in a new form--no longer
stimulated by the pressure of extreme peril, but excited by the new
possibilities of corporate democratic activity. The young lions of the
Fabian Society in their optimistic infancy were filled with the idea of
the State, and advocated State action in wide spheres of industrial
organization, municipal enterprise, and social reform. The Imperial
Federation League gloried anew in the name of Britain, and strove to
bring the four quarters of the earth within the circle of a
self-conscious Empire. Later on, the Tariff Reform League demanded
State-control and regulation of our world-wide commerce.

But the revival of the idea of the State, under the stimulus of
Socialists, Imperialists, Protectionists, and others, was short lived.
All these enthusiasts became disappointed and disgusted with democracy
and with the State which it controls. Democracy did not move fast enough
for them, nor always in the direction that they desired. Hence--and most
markedly since the dawn of the twentieth century--a reaction against the
State has set in. There has bee