ve it freedom, with a
great future of its own, capable of protecting itself, and developing
with freedom into true nationhood. Personal freedom, colonial freedom,
international freedom, were parts of one whole. Non-intervention, peace,
restriction of armaments, retrenchment of expenditure, reduction of
taxation, were the connected series of practical consequences. The money
retrenched from wasteful military expenditure need not all be remitted
to the taxpayer. A fraction of it devoted to education--free, secular,
and universal--would do as much good as when spent on guns and ships it
did harm. For education was necessary to raise the standard of
intelligence, and provide the substantial equality of opportunity at the
start without which the mass of men could not make use of the freedom
given by the removal of legislative restrictions. There were here
elements of a more constructive view for which Cobden and his friends
have not always received sufficient credit.

In the main, however, the teaching of the Manchester school tended both
in external and in internal affairs to a restricted view of the function
of government. Government had to maintain order, to restrain men from
violence and fraud, to hold them secure in person and property against
foreign and domestic enemies, to give them redress against injury, that
so they may rely on reaping where they have sown, may enjoy the fruits
of their industry, may enter unimpeded into what arrangements they will
with one another for their mutual benefit. Let us see what criticism was
passed on this view by the contemporaries of Cobden and by the loud
voice of the facts themselves. The old economic regime had been in decay
throughout the eighteenth century. The divorce of the labourer from the
land was complete at the time when the Anti-Corn Law League was formed.
The mass of the English peasantry were landless labourers working for a
weekly wage of about ten or twelve shillings, and often for a good deal
less. The rise of machine industry since 1760 had destroyed the old
domestic system and reduced the operative in the towns to the position
of a factory hand under an employer, who found the road to wealth easy
in the monopoly of manufacture enjoyed by this country for two
generations after the Napoleonic war. The factory system early brought
matters to a head at one point by the systematic employment of women and
young children under conditions which outraged the public conscien