The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the double tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth.  On the one hand he is the founder of the classic political economy.  With Ricardo, the elder Mill and Nassau Senior, the main preoccupation is the production of wealth without regard to its moral environment; and the state for them is merely an engine to protect the atmosphere in which business men achieve their labors.  There is nothing in them of that fine despair which made Stuart Mill welcome socialism itself rather than allow the continuance of the new capitalist system.  Herein the State is purged of moral purpose; and the utilitarian method achieves the greatest happiness by insisting that the technique of production must dominate all other circumstances.  Until the Reform Act of 1867, the orthodox economists remained unchallenged.  The use of the franchise was only beginning to be understood.  The “new model” of trade unionism had not yet been tested in the political field.  But it was discovered impossible to act any longer upon the assumptions of the abstract economic man.  The infallible sense of his own interest was discovered to be without basis in the facts for the simple reason that the instruments of his perception obviously required training if they were to be applied to a complex world.  Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense, passed away because it failed to build a State wherein a channel of expression might be found for the creative energies of humble men.

It is only within the last two decades that we have begun to understand the inner significance of the protest against this economic liberalism.  Adam Smith had declared the source of value to lie in labor; and, at the moment of its deepest agony, there were men willing to point the moral of his tale.  That it represented an incautious analysis was, for them, unimportant beside the fact that it opened once more a path whereby economics could be reclaimed for moral science.  For if labor was the source of value, as Bray and Thompson pointed out, it seemed as though degradation was the sole payment for its services.  They did not ask whether the organization they envisaged was economically profitable, but whether it was ethically right.  No one can read the history of these years and fail to understand their uncompromising denial of its rightness.  Their negation fell upon unheeding ears; but twenty years later, the tradition for which they stood came into Marx’s hands and was fashioned by him into an interpretation of history.  With all its faults of statement and of emphasis, the doctrine of the English socialists has been, in later hands, the most fruitful hypothesis of modern politics.  It was a deliberate effort, upon the basis of Adam Smith’s ideas, to create a commonwealth in the interests of the masses.  Wealth, in its view, was less the mere production of goods than the accumulated happiness of humble men.  The impulses it praised and sought through state-action to express were, indeed,