of his narrow desire for material advancement.  And that, indeed, is the starting-point of modern effort.  Our liberty means the consistent expression of our personality in media where we find people like-minded with ourselves in their conception of social life.  The very scale of civilization implies collective plans and common effort.  The constant revision of our basic notions was inevitable immediately science was applied to industry.  There was thus no reason to believe that the system of individual interests for which Smith stood sponsor was more likely to fit requirements of a new time than one which implied the national regulation of business enterprise.  The danger in every period of history is lest we take our own age as the term in institutional evolution.  Private enterprise has the sanction of prescription; but since the Industrial Revolution the chief lesson we have had to learn is the unsatisfactory character of that title.  History is an unenviable record of bad metaphysics used to defend obsolete systems.  It took almost a century after the publication of the Wealth of Nations for men to realize that its axioms represented the experience of a definite time.  Smith thought of freedom in the terms most suitable to his generation and stated them with a largeness of view which remains impressive even at a century’s distance.

But nothing is more certain in the history of political philosophy than that the problem of freedom changes with each age.  The nineteenth century sought release from political privilege; and it built its success upon the system prepared by its predecessor.  It can never be too greatly emphasized that in each age the substance of liberty will be found in what the dominating forces of that age most greatly want.  With Locke, with Smith, with Hegel and with Marx, the ultimate hypothesis is always the summary of some special experience universalized.  That does not mean that the past is worthless.  Politics, as Seeley said, are vulgar unless they are liberalized by history; and a state which failed to see itself as a mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its novelties upon foundations of sand.  Suspicions of collective effort in the eighteenth century ought not to mean suspicion in the twentieth; to think in such fashion is to fall into the error for which Lassalle so finely criticized Hegel.  It is as though one were to confound the accidental phases of the history of property with the philosophic basis of property itself.  From such an error it is the task of history above all to free us.  For it records the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as a perennial challenge to the coming time.