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The Evangelical discipline, secularized as respectability, was the strongest binding force in a nation which without it might have broken up, as it had already broken loose. For a generation and more the static conception of society^[6] had been dissolving because society itself was dissolving. ‘A nobleman, a gentleman, a yeoman,’ Cromwell told one of his Parliaments, ‘that is a good interest.’ But the good interest was splitting into a hundred aristocracies and a hundred democracies, button-makers and gentlemen button-makers,^[7] all heels and elbows, jostling, pushing, snubbing, presuming. On the whole, the articulate classes, whose writings and conversation make opinion, were gainers by the change—it has been estimated, for example, that between 1815 and 1830 the purchasing capacity of the classes above the wage-earning level was all but doubled—and the Victorian belief in progress was bottomed on the complacency which comes of steadily rising incomes and steadily improving security. Mixed with this, no doubt, was the vulgar pride in mere quantity, the thoughtless exultation of a crowd in motion. But no one can read for long in the literature of the thirties and forties without touching a finer and deeper pride, portentously draped in tables of trade and revenue and the publications of the Useful Knowledge Society, but glowing with the authentic sense of war and victory, man against nature, and reason against the traditions of the elders.

Great things are done when men and mountains meet.

To travellers descending from the moorlands, the smoke and roar of Lancashire seemed like the smoke and roar of a battle-field, and the discipline of the factories like the discipline of a great army. It is hardly an accident that the first history of the Renaissance came from Liverpool^[8] and that the most conspicuous memorial of the Utilitarians is a History of Greece. Across the ages, the modern Englishman recognized his peers.

But we must be careful if we are to keep the picture true, not to view the early Victorian age of production through that distorting medium, the late Victorian age of finance. Science touched the imagination by its tangible results. It was immersed in matter, and it conformed directly to the Augustan canon of historic progress by its immediate contribution to the ‘order, regularity, and refinement of life’. Romance and the Revolution bred ideas of human purpose which only slowly permeated the English mind. Even in 1830—far more powerfully in 1840—they were beginning to work. But the common intelligence was still dominated by the solid humanism of the Augustans, to which the Eighteenth Proposition of Oxford Liberalism would have seemed a self-evident truth:

Virtue is the child of Knowledge: Vice of Ignorance: therefore education, periodical literature, railroad travelling, ventilation, and the arts of life, when fully carried out, serve to make a population moral and happy.^[9]

’The objects of this Society’, so ran the prospectus of the Rochdale Pioneers, ‘are the moral and intellectual advancement of its members. It provides them with groceries, butcher’s meat, drapery goods, clothes and clogs.’ Gas-lighting of the streets was hardly an improvement so much as a revolution in public security;^[10] cheap cotton goods in personal cleanliness, colza lamps in domestic comfort. Finance, the manipulation of wealth and credit as things by themselves, three or four degrees removed from the visible crop or ore, was an adjunct. Production was the thing itself.

A generation which has come to take invention for granted and is, perhaps, more sensitive to its mischief than its benefits, cannot easily recover the glory of an age when knowledge, and with it power, seemed to have been released for an illimitable destiny.^[11] The Englishman might reluctantly allow that in social amenity the French, in care for the well-being of the people the Prussians, went beyond him. He might at moments be chilled by the aesthetic failure of his time, so profuse and yet so mean: alienated by its ethical assurance, at once so pretentious and so narrow. In a petulant mood, he would talk, with Grote, of the Age of Steam and Cant, but all the while he knew that in the essential business of humanity, the mastery of brute nature by intelligence, he had outstripped the world, and the Machine was the emblem and the instrument of his triumph. The patriotism of early Victorian England, not yet blooded by the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, irritated by Napoleon III, or exalted by the vision of empire, was at heart a pride in human capacity, which time had led to fruition in England; and in the great humanist, who brought all history to glorify the age of which he was the most honoured child, it heard its own voice speaking.^[12]

To articulate the creed of progress, to state its evidences and draw out its implications, was the mission of that remarkable group of men variously known as the Utilitarians, or the Philosophic Radicals. In discipleship or reaction no young mind of the thirties could escape their influence. Bentham’s alliance with James Mill, Mill’s friendship with Malthus and Ricardo, had created a party, almost a sect, with formularies as compact as the Evangelical theology, and conclusions not less inexorable. However far the Benthamite disciple went, he would find the old sage had been there before him; every trail was blazed, every pitfall marked, and in every path stood a lion, the Sinister Interest of Privilege. Between rulers and ruled there exists an inherent antagonism^[13] which can only be resolved if rulers and ruled are identified by means of universal suffrage and the ballot-box, and the identity is preserved by publicity and a cheap press.^[14] The sovereignty thus created is to be exercised through a carefully balanced system: of Parliament to legislate, central organs to direct, local organs to execute. On the question of Women’s Suffrage, the Utilitarians were somewhat inconsistently divided; Bentham, a flirtatious old bachelor, being more logical than James Mill, who, in spite of Malthus, had begotten more children than he could afford on a female whom he despised. On all other matters, above all on the sovereign authority of Economic Law, they spoke with one voice.

Reduced from an aspiration to a schedule, progress might seem a gloomy business for the mass of mankind. It rests on competition, and always and everywhere competition is reducing the profits of the employer, and the wages of the workman, to the level of bare subsistence. Only the landowner, the common enemy of all, continually profits by the growing demand for sites, and for food, because, always and everywhere, population is pressing on the means to live. Such is the law. But Nature has not left her children without all hope of escaping the fate to which her mathematics seem to have consigned them. By industry, and abstinence, the employer may enlarge the market for his goods; by industry, and continence, the workman may increase the purchasing power, and limit the numbers, of his class: progress, like salvation, is the reward of virtue; of diligence and self-education; of providence and self-control; and all the evolutionary speculation of the next age has for background Malthus’s Stoic vision of that remote, austere, divinity ‘whose purpose is ever to bring a mind out of the clod’.

In the early thirties the Philosophic Radicals were a portent, men whose meetings were watched, the spearhead of a revolution beginning with the ballot and going on, Heaven knew how far, to compulsory education and a federated Empire. Then, frigid and scholastic, as a party they fade from the view. The popular Radicals, hotter against Church and Lords, and readier champions of the unprivileged and the oppressed, made more noise; the people preferred the Tories. Grote lived to decline a peerage; when the ballot was at last conceded in 1872 John Mill had decided that he did not want it and had moved on to proportional representation instead; Leader vanished into an aesthetic Italian exile; Molesworth’s features are more familiar at Ottawa than his name at Westminster. The case for Free Trade was taken out of their hands by men who had learnt their economics in the counting-house, their logic on the platform, and their rhetoric in the pulpit.^[15] But they had done inestimable service. They came down into a world where medieval prejudice, Tudor Law, Stuart economics, and Hanoverian patronage still luxuriated in wild confusion, and by the straight and narrow paths they cut we are walking still. The Gladstonian Liberals have gone where the Peelites followed the Canningites; the Evangelical creed long ago foundered on the Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, and the great Whig name has not been heard for fifty years. But it would be hard to find any corner of our public life where the spirit of Bentham is not working to-day.

It is dangerous to force historic movements into exaggerated symmetry. But the parallel operation of Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism cannot be ignored. Their classics, Malthus on Population and Wilberforce’s Practical View, appeared almost simultaneously, one in 1797, the other in 1798. Their greatest victories in public affairs, the Abolition of Slavery and the Reform of the Poor Law, were won in 1833 and 1834. When a distracted Government threw the Old Poor Law at a Royal Commission, the Benthamites rose to the height of their opportunity. The Secretary of the Commission was Edwin Chadwick, whom the Patriarch had selected to be his apostle to the new age, and in his hands there was no fear lest the faith should grow cold. Born in 1800, in a Lancashire farmhouse where the children were washed all over, every day, the mainspring of Chadwick’s career seems to have been a desire to wash the people of England all over, every day, by administrative order. In practical capacity Chadwick was the greatest, in the character of his mind, in the machine-like simplicity of his ideas and the inexhaustible fertility of his applications, the most typical of the Benthamites. Napoleon III once asked him what he thought of his improvements in Paris. ‘Sir,’ he answered, ‘it was said of Augustus that he found Rome brick and left it marble. May it be said of you that you found Paris stinking and left it sweet.’ It might stand for Chadwick’s epitaph. He found England stinking. If he did not leave it sweet, the fault was certainly not his. Through the Poor Law Commission, the Benthamite formula—inquiry, legislation, execution, inspection, and report—was incorporated in our working constitution. It was rounded off by the invention of the Public Audit and the Grant-in-aid to tighten central control and stimulate local activity. But the corresponding formula for unofficial effort—information, agitation, the parent society, the local branch, the picture,^[16] and the handbill—had been discovered by the Evangelicals and humanitarians in their warfare against slavery, and by them it was imparted to the Chartists and the Free Trade League.

The Evangelical and Utilitarian movements both rested on a body of doctrine which to question was impious or irrational; in both cases the doctrine was the reflection of an exceptional experience, the religious experience of a nation undergoing a moral revival, its social experience during a revolution in the methods of production: and in both cases a larger view was certain to show that neither was a more than provisional synthesis. In the meantime they furnished England with a code and a great company of interpreters: with their almost Genevan rigour, and almost Latin clarity, they imposed themselves like foreign task-masters on the large, ironic English mind, and their great doctrines were all too readily snipped into texts for the guidance of those who did not wish to think at all, and the repression of those who wished to think for themselves, into Cant for Practical Men and Cant for Serious Men. Finally, they were alike in this, that each imparted its peculiar virtue: the Evangelicals their zeal for holiness, the Utilitarians their faith in reason, to the movements, even to the reactions which sprang out of them, to Tractarians and Agnostics who denied their introspective ethic, to Tories and Socialists who challenged their conception of the competitive State.

[6]	As explained, for example, by an Irish judge in 1798. ‘Society consists of noblemen, baronets, knights, esquires, gentlemen, yeomen, tradesmen and artificers.’ The jury found that, as the subject had ceased to be a breeches maker without becoming a gentleman, he must be a yeoman.

[7]	For whom there were separate doors in the Birmingham taverns.

[8]	‘The historian of the Age of Leo (Roscoe) has brought into cultivation the extensive tract of Chatmoss,’ (Mrs. Barbauld, 1811.)

[9]	Newman, Apologia, Note A. But what does serve mean? The almost magical effect of ventilation on the moral habits (temper and sobriety) of a poor quarter was demonstrated again and again.

[10]	‘Without presuming to play on words,’ said the Lambeth magistrate, ‘I regard gas as essential to an enlightened police.’ It was once proposed to illuminate thieves’ quarters with lamps of a special construction so that law-abiding pedestrians should pass by on the other side.

[11]	The admiration of Bacon, almost amounting to a rediscovery, is very characteristic of the period. So is the Utilitarian preference for the more scholastic, less imaginative Hobbes. When his editor, Molesworth, stood for Southwark the populace paraded the streets shouting NO OBBS.

[12]

Il a son orgueil d’homme. Taine’s fine saying of Macaulay is true of his whole age. ‘That wicked XVIII century’ died hard: under his Romantic ornament Macaulay is through and through Augustan; and contemporary critics (Brougham and Harriet Martineau are examples) reproduce against him the charges which the early Romantics had laid against Gibbon—materialism and want of philosophy.

[13]	Translate this into economic terms, substitute for the antagonism of rulers and ruled the antagonism of employers and employed, and some curious conclusions will follow which the Socialists of the next age were ready to draw.

[14]

‘The principle of human nature, upon which the necessity of government is founded, the propensity of one man to possess himself of the objects of desire at the cost of another, leads on, by infallible sequence, not only to that degree of plunder which leaves the members (except the instruments and recipients) the bare means of subsistence, but to that degree of cruelty which is necessary to keep in existence the most intense terrors.’—James Mill on Government.

[15]	The supersession of Charles Villiers by Cobden, Bright, and W. J. Fox is typical.

[16]	For example, the fine colour prints by Smith after Morland, of the shipwrecked crew entertained by natives, whom they return to carry into slavery.