54 ENGLISHSAGA

dominions, removed from the statute book the barbarous laws
that condemned men to the pillory and women to the lash,
reduced from more than a hundred and fifty to six the crimes
punishable by death and rendered illegal the cruel sports of cock-
fighting and bull-baiting. These humanitarians rigidly opposed
the infliction of all needless pain except in the factories and mines
of England. For here, in their view, it could not be avoided.

This melancholy and fatalistic attitude towards industrial
suffering was bound up with the high hopes which had been
formed of human nature by the idealists of the eighteenth
century. It was this that made it so formidable. The age of
reason saw the birth of a belief that challenged the older notion
of revealed religion and morality. By the light of the untram-
melled mind, man would be able to attain to perfection. Only two
things were necessary: that he should strictly observe natural
law and be freed from every antiquated legal shackle, supersti-
tion and custom that prevented him from following his will
according to the light of his own reason. The emancipation
of the individual reason was the key to a new era of happiness
and perfection. Man was born free: he had only to rid himself
of his chains to enter into' his heritage.

In France this theory, first preached by philosophers and
later accepted as a social truism, had resulted in the storming
of the Bastille,, the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies. In sober
commercial England it had taken a more prosaic form.
Expounded for more than half a century by a rich and
respectable philanthropist of genius, the promotion of "the
greatest happiness of the greatest number" had become the polite
faith of nine "enlightened" English reformers out of ten. It
was Jeremy Bentham's belief that that happiness could most
readily be realised by the free exercise on the part of every
individual of enlightened self-interest. Complete freedom of
contract was the very core of the utilitarian creed. Any denial
of it by the State could only delay and perhaps defeat the bene-
ficent purposes of Providence.

A theory, running counter to the whole course of English
social history, was thus employed both by members of the
government and by manufacturers, as well as by academic
economists, to justify almost any suffering or inhumanity.
Employers and employed must be left free to make whatever