manship of that period, so far as it had to do with the health or happiness of the people, be considered, an emphatic condemnation must be pronounced. As a legislator of that time said, legislation really proceeded on the principle that life had grown cheap. Parliament's constructive social legislation was practically confined to multiplying capital offences, which, at the Revolution of 1688, were about fifty in number, and, at the opening of the nineteenth century, had risen to about two hundred. The penal code, presently to be transformed by Sir Robert Peel, was the standard of our legislative bankruptcy.
Then arose a school of thinkers who made it their business to find principles for our social negligence, and to propound theories to correspond with our administrative futility. In default of religion, which had definitely abjured leadership, they substituted a formal political agnosticism. They pushed confidently across the shoals of human nature laid bare by the religious ebb. They brought to birth the economic man! On that view, our species is chiefly animated by the pursuit of profit, and from that hypothesis they extracted the laws of politics. Man became the premiss of a deductive syllogism. There was an iron logic, a faultless sequence, an invulnerability in their conclusions, as they rolled them down from the height of this inexorable postulate. It was the gospel of the manufacturer-take-the-hindmost. Such, originating in the divorce of the State and religion,
