xample." Alas,
in France and in continental Europe generally at that time, selfish
material interests and their class representatives were very strong,
popular power was weak; in most of them the soldier was the master.
Happily for our famous chancellor of the exchequer, England was different.

It has often been said that he ignored the social question; did not even
seem to know there was one. The truth is, that what marks him from other
chancellors is exactly the dominating hold gained by the social question
in all its depth and breadth upon his most susceptible imagination. Tariff
reform, adjustment of burdens, invincible repugnance to waste or
profusion, accurate keeping and continuous scrutiny of accounts,
substitution of a few good taxes for many bad ones,--all these were not
merely the love of a methodical and thrifty man for habits of business;
they were directly associated in him with the amelioration of the hard lot
of the toiling mass, and sprang from an ardent concern in improving human
well-being, and raising the moral ideals of mankind. In his "musings for
the good of man," Liberation of Intercourse, to borrow his own larger name
for free trade, figured in his mind's eye as one of the promoting
conditions of abundant employment. "If you want," he said in a pregnant
proposition, "to benefit the labouring classes and to do the maximum of
good, it is not enough to operate upon the articles consumed by them; you
should rather operate on the articles that give them the maximum of
employment." In other words, you should extend the area of trade by
steadily removing restrictions. He recalled the days when our predecessors
thought it must be for man's good to have "most of the avenues by which
the mind, and also the hand of man conveyed and exchanged their respective
products," blocked or narrowed by regulation and taxation. Dissemination
of news, travelling, letters, transit of goods, were all made as costly
and difficult as the legislator could make them. "I rank," he said, "the
introduction of cheap postage for letters, documents, patterns, and
printed matter, and the abolition of all taxes on printed matter, in the
catalogue of free trade legislation. These great measures may well take
their place beside the abolition of prohibitions and protective duties,
the simplifying of revenue laws, and the repeal of the Navigation Act, as
forming together the great code of industrial emancipation."(39)

(M20) It was not