gh all the universities of the globe.

The only form of study which a political thinker of one or two hundred
years ago would now note as missing is any attempt to deal with politics
in its relation to the nature of man. The thinkers of the past, from
Plato to Bentham and Mill, had each his own view of human nature, and
they made those views the basis of their speculations on government. But
no modern treatise on political science, whether dealing with
institutions or finance, now begins with anything corresponding to the
opening words of Bentham's _Principles of Morals and
Legislation_--'Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two
sovereign masters, pain and pleasure'; or to the 'first general
proposition' of Nassau Senior's _Political Economy,_ 'Every man desires
to obtain additional wealth with as little sacrifice as possible.'[1] In
most cases one cannot even discover whether the writer is conscious of
possessing any conception of human nature at all.

[1] _Political, Economy_ (in the _Encyclopedia Metropolitana_), 2nd
edition (1850), p. 26.

It is easy to understand how this has come about. Political science is
just beginning to regain some measure of authority after the
acknowledged failure of its confident professions during the first half
of the nineteenth century. Bentham's Utilitarianism, after superseding
both Natural Right and the blind tradition of the lawyers, and serving
as the basis of innumerable legal and constitutional reforms throughout
Europe, was killed by the unanswerable refusal of the plain man to
believe that ideas of pleasure and pain are the only sources of human
motive. The 'classical' political economy of the universities and the
newspapers, the political economy of MacCulloch and Senior and
Archbishop Whately, was even more unfortunate in its attempt to deduce a
whole industrial polity from a 'few simple principles' of human nature.
It became identified with the shallow dogmatism by which well-to-do
people in the first half of Queen Victoria's reign tried to convince
working men that any change in the distribution of the good things of
life was 'scientifically impossible.' Marx and Buskin and Carlyle were
masters of sarcasm, and the process is not yet forgotten by which they
slowly compelled even the newspapers to abandon the 'laws of political
economy' which from 1815 to 1870 stood, like gigantic stuffed policemen,
on guard over rent and profits.

When the struggle against '