investigated the eternal problem of Church and State as that to which Hoadly’s bishopric contributed its name.  De Lolme is the real parent of that interpretative analysis which has, in Bagehot’s hands, become not the least fruitful type of political method.  Blackstone, in a real sense, may be called the ancestor of Professor Dicey.  The very calmness of the atmosphere only the more surely paved the way for the surprising novelties of Godwin and the revolutionists.

Nor must we neglect the relation between its ethics and its politics.  The eighteenth century school of British moralists has suffered somewhat beside the greater glories of Berkeley and Hume.  Yet it was a great work to which they bent their effort, and they knew its greatness.  The deistic controversy involved a fresh investigation of the basis of morals; and it is to the credit of the investigators that they attempted to provide it in social terms.  It is, indeed, one of the primary characteristics of the British mind to be interested in problems of conduct rather than of thought.  The seventeenth century had, for the most part, been interested in theology and government; and its preoccupation, in both domains, with supernatural sanctions, made its conclusions unfitted for a period dominated by rationalism.  Locke regarded his Human Understanding as the preliminary to an ethical enquiry; and Hume seems to have considered his Principles of Morals the most vital of his works.  It may be true, as the mordant insight of Mark Pattison suggested, that “those periods in which morals have been represented as the proper study of man, and his only business, have been periods of spiritual abasement and poverty.”  Certainly no one will be inclined to claim for the eighteenth century the spiritual idealism of the seventeenth, though Law and Bishop Wilson and the Wesleyan revival will make us generalize with caution.  But the truth was that theological ethics had become empty and inadequate, and the problem was therefore urgent.  That is why Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith—­to take only men of the first eminence—­were thinking not less for politics than for ethics when they sought to justify the ways of man to man.  For all of them saw that a theory of society is impossible without the provision of psychological foundations; and those must, above all, result in a theory of conduct if the social bond is to be maintained.  That sure insight is, of course, one current only in a greater English stream which reaches back to Hobbes at its source and forward to T.H.  Green at perhaps its fullest.  Its value is its denial of politics as a science distinct from other human relations; and that is why Adam Smith can write of moral sentiments no less than of the wealth of nations.  The eighteenth century saw clearly that each aspect of social life must find its place in the political equation.