ndlord.

The difference, neverthelesss, was one of emphasis and expression, not
of principle. It mattered very little in practice whether private
property and unfettered economic freedom were stated, as in France, to
be natural rights, or whether, as in England, they were merely assumed
once for all to be expedient. In either case they were taken for
granted as the fundamentals upon which social organization was to be
based, and about which no further argument was admissible. Though
Bentham argued that rights were derived from utility, not from nature,
he did not push his analysis so far as to argue that any particular
right was relative to any particular function, and thus endorsed
indiscriminately rights which were not accompanied by service as well
as rights which were. While eschewing, in short, the phraseology of
natural rights, the English Utilitarians retained something not unlike
the substance of them. For they assumed that private property in {18}
land, and the private ownership of capital, were natural institutions,
and gave them, indeed, a new lease of life, by proving to their own
satisfaction that social well-being must result from their continued
exercise. Their negative was as important as their positive teaching.
It was a conductor which diverted the lightning. Behind their
political theory, behind the practical conduct, which as always,
continues to express theory long after it has been discredited in the
world of thought, lay the acceptance of absolute rights to property and
to economic freedom as the unquestioned center of social organization.

The result of that attitude was momentous. The motive and inspiration
of the Liberal Movement of the eighteenth century had been the attack
on Privilege. But the creed which had exorcised the specter of
agrarian feudalism haunting village and _chateau_ in France, was
impotent to disarm the new ogre of industrialism which was stretching
its limbs in the north of England. When, shorn of its splendors and
illusions, liberalism triumphed in England in 1832, it carried without
criticism into the new world of capitalist industry categories of
private property and freedom of contract which had been forged in the
simpler economic environment of the pre-industrial era. In England
these categories are being bent and twisted till they are no longer
recognizable, and will, in time, be made harmless. In America, where
necessity compelled the crystallization of