THE MARCH OF THE CARAVAN 169

entail was its peculiar expression in the purely material sphere.
By denying the younger sons the enjoyment of inherited wealth
and strictly limiting its use by the elder, the national property
was preserved.from dissipation while its educative influence in
each generation was rendered as wide as possible.

It had been the attempt of the state to fulfil its ancient func-
tions of trusteeship that had most irritated the early individualists.
English Liberalism began as a protest against every legal restraint
that prevented the citizen from exercising his full freedom of
choice. That in an old country like England there were a great
many such restraints and that most of them in the light of the
•sudden changes wrought by the industrial revolution were hope-
lessly out of date lent popular force to what might otherwise have
been a purely academic and therefore ineffective rebellion against
traditional paternalism. A poor man might not settle in a new
parish lest he should become a burden to the ratepayers, skilled
artisans were forbidden to leave the country or migrate to the
colonies, machinery might not be exported. Usury and fore-
stalling—the very Hfe-blood of modern commercial practice—were
still in theory proscribed by laws enacted in the Middle Ages.
Because of the seventeenth century Navigation Acts, American
ships calling for freight in this country had often to enter British
ports empty while British ships fetching cotton from the United
States were forced in retaliation to make their outward journey
across the Atlantic without cargo. The consumer had thus to
pay the. cost of freight twice in his purchase price. A stubbornly
conservative country continued to maintain laws and institu-
tions which had done yeoman service in the past but which were
little better than a mockery to the hungry generations of the new
industrial towns. The demand for their abolition became irresist-
ible with the increasing urbanisation of the country.

The Benthamite assault on the statutory interference of
society with the freedom of the individual thus presented itself
at first as the march of common sense and humanity against the
ramparts of obscurantist corruption and privilege. From 1830
to 1874 Liberalism—the political expression of Benthamism—
was the most dynamic force in Britain. It derived its strength
from the urban and educated middle-classes who enjoyed electoral
supremacy between the first and second Reform Bills, from the
manufacturers who wanted nothing to stand between them and
their search for wealth, and from the still unenfranchised masses