universal benevolence seems to him more the affair of God than of man. God is, to employ Adam Smith's own image, a good General, Who can be trusted to look after the grand strategy of His universe. This doctrine is but the divine harmony of Shaftesbury, Pope, Hutcheson, and so many of the eighteenth-century philosophers, and corresponds to Kant's idea, that the individual will is free, but that the collective will is determinate. The economics of Adam Smith are closely connected with his philosophy.

Thus it comes about that Adam Smith was ready to go further than either Burke or Chatham in the matter of colonial trade. He did not concern himself so much with the legality or justice of the restrictions as with the fact that they were useless. A great deal of ingenuity has been wasted in showing how other men had attacked the mercantile system before Adam Smith. But it was he who first pushed the attack home, and that is his great title to fame. No genius springs, like Pallas Athene, helmeted and armed from the head of Zeus, it must find materials ready to its hand. The question that Adam Smith put to his countrymen was, "Is it worth while injuring ourselves, our colonies, and the whole human race, for the benefit of a small set of producers?" He tacitly assumes that if the State (within certain limits) leaves well alone, God will take over the management of affairs, and selfishness and greed will be ministering angels in His scheme of ordering all things for the happiness of mankind. This curious sort of mysticism we shall find recurring very frequently in modern times, and perhaps Bastiat in France and Herbert Spencer in England have been its most naïve exponents.

Adam Smith's opinions on the question of American taxation form a landmark in the development of imperial thought. His advocacy of liberty leads him to put forward a definite scheme of imperial federation. He sees

how useless it is to tax the colonies either directly, or indirectly through their assemblies. But there is no reason why they should not be represented in the Imperial Parliament, even though, in the course of time, this might lead to the shifting of government from England to America; for Adam Smith saw plainly how the daughter nation would one day surpass us in numbers and resources. Here we have a conception of imperialism in which the empire is allowed absolutely to dwarf the old patriotism. No wonder that the two most important events of history are, to Adam Smith, the voyage of Columbus and that of Vasco da Gama.

Such were the influences working in favour of a patriotism, and an imperialism, founded upon freedom. As yet they were but as voices crying in the wilderness, and the bulk of the nation were inclined to follow Lord North and King George rather than Burke. It is a characteristic of the eighteenth century that so many of the most sensitive and thoughtful spirits are to be found pulling against the current of their time. Even Chatham died in a minority.

CHAPTER VI

THE DAWN OF ROMANCE

VEN at the nadir of the eighteenth century, amid the clumsy tyranny of the Pelhams and the gloomy prognostications of seeing men, some light might have been detected streaking the clouds, some promise of a new dawn. What was Chatham himself but such a promise; the forerunner, the living pledge, of England's resurrection? All over Europe there was a shaking, as of the dry bones in the valley; those who observed the signs of the times did not fail to mark the omens, only half understood, of an impending crisis. Perhaps no event has had so many prophets as the French Revolution.

We must distinguish between two tendencies, as different, and yet as complementary, as positive and negative currents of electricity, and therefore apt to be confused. Before the eaglet of romance (if thus we may be permitted to speak of the new spiritual renaissance) could burst through the hard shell of the eighteenth century, this hardness had to be dissolved in the acid of its own materialism. Indeed, there was one outstanding merit about the cold and ruthless reasoning that had cast its blight upon Europe; it was at least a moving and progressive force, even if that progress was not heavenwards. It did not stand still, like many a stately cult of the Orient, or like the pessimism that casts its dark shadow over the modern world. It is fearful indeed to reverence nothing,

but we may learn thereby to lose our regard for what is really contemptible, and to break the old tyrannous idols of our superstition. The cynicism that made possible the tyranny of a Newcastle or a Louis XV, also helped to destroy the authority upon which that tyranny was buttressed, to pave the way for reform in England and destruction in France. It is easy to show that few of the most violent of pre-Revolutionary extremists contemplated the orgies of Notre Dame, or the bloodshed of the Terror, but he who saps the foundations of a building must share in the responsibility for its fall. Voltaire believed in monarchy, he may even have believed in what he called God, but his laughter was crackling flame, which burnt up even the forms of loyalty and worship, and when the forms were burnt, what was left to the Ancien Régime?

Now we have seen something of the same kind at work in England, where Hume was loosening the foundations of thought and Mandeville those of morals, and the principles, for which men had formerly striven, had degenerated into catchwords. But there is a marked difference between the trend of thought in England and in France, which, as most Englishmen will believe, told in our favour. In France, the dissatisfaction with the old order was absolute and uncompromising. There was a last flicker of loyalty during Louis XV's illness at Metz, and the triumphs of Marshal Saxe shed a sunset glamour over the heritage of Le Roi Soleil, but the Seven Years' War left the monarchy naked to the attacks of its critics, which were all the more bitter because they proceeded by sarcasm and innuendo. Voltaire might laud the age of Louis XIV, but for that of his great-grandson he had only contempt. There was in France nothing corresponding to the "roast beef of old England," to the worship of the Constitution, and the opinion, however unreasonable, that an Englishman was not only a better man, but better

off than any foreigner. On the contrary, it was the habit in France itself to lend colour to English insularity by such eulogies as those of Montesquieu. Thus the attacks of our English reformers upon English abuses were more conservative, and less uncompromising, than those which heralded the Revolution. Seldom do we find them indulging in such bitter invectives against everything venerable as were common to the philosophes, and seldom, as yet, do we hear of such Utopian dreams as those of Condorçet, dreams whose realization implies a clean sweep of everything existing.

It was a good thing, after all, that, even amid the reality of tyranny, we preserved the forms of freedom. The Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights and the Glorious Revolution were accepted by most Englishmen as part of their natural inheritance, without too much critical inquiry into their present worth. The forms of popular election were religiously preserved, and the average freeholder was the last person to object to the opportunity for exchanging his vote for beer and bribes unlimited. Besides, the Government, up to the last quarter of the century, had a salutary and well-grounded fear of the mob. Even those who most despaired of England, appealed to precedent rather than to abstract ideals. The most bitter reproach of Chatham was couched in his sentence, "The Constitution at this moment stands violated! and he appealed to our Political Bible of Magna Carta, Petition of Rights, and Bill of Rights. To restore the old liberties was the object of reformers, not to create new heavens and a new earth.

Yet there was more than a tincture of the spirit that turns aside from a world of which it has grown weary, with persiflage or indifference. Men loved little, because they had little faith. A Horace Walpole would contemplate national scandal and humiliation with a polite shrug of the shoulders; while the conduct of Gibbon, the grandest