32 ENGLISHSAGA

Yet the momentum behind such paternal legislation had long
been running down. Among the intellectual leaders of the nation,
faith in a divinely appointed order was giving way to a new belief
in the unaided power of human reason. Men, it was felt, could
live best, not by adherence to traditional standards of aggregate
wisdom and justice, but by their own sharp wits. And with the
weakening of ,the authority of the central government that
followed the defeat of the Crown by the aristocracy, the rich
and powerful grew restive at any interference with their free-
dom of action. In every place where the old forms of organised
life were giving place to new—in the capital, in the ports and
the industrial towns—the vigorous and stubborn Anglo-Saxon
temperament, so tenacious for personal rights and jealous of free-
dom, responded to appeals to shake off the trammels of the*
feudal and priestly past.

Thus over an ever-widening circle the will and interest of the
individual came to be regarded as more important than
Christian justice and the community. The profit motive super-
seded the communal conscience as the ultimate arbiter of national
policy. The consequence was quickly reflected in legislation and
administration. Yet in the countryside where the old forms of an
ordered life still lingered, there was an instinctive conviction, or
prejudice, as some called It, that man was more important than
money and moral health than reason. The state might divest
itself of moral authority: but the individual conscience, moulded
by the unbroken centuries of Christian rule, remained. Whatever
bagmen might practise and economists preach, the ordinary
Englishman clung to an ideal that had nothing to do with
profit-making and little with abstract reason—that of a "gentle-
man." He most valued the man whose word was as good as his
bond, whose purse was ever open to the needy, whose heart was
above calculation and meanness, and who was fearless toward
the strong and tender and chivalrous towards the weak:—in other
words a Christian. When Squire Brown sent his son to Rugby,
he asked himself before giving him his final injunctions what he
wanted of him:

"Shall I tell him to mind his work, and say he's sent to
school to make himself a good scholar? Wdl, but he isn't sent
to school for that—at any rate, not for that mainly. I don't
care a straw for Greek particles, or the digamma, no more