1^0 ENGLISH SAGA

of the industrial towro whose sufferings under a senile system
made a strong appeal both to humanitarian and rational feelings.
That these sufferings were far more due to the absence of protect-
ive social institutions than to the presence of antiquated and in-
efficient ones was not yet realised.

For fifty years British legislative annals mark the steady
removal from the statute book of every law that offended against
individualistic reasoning. Privileges and illogical anachronisms
were ruthlessly swept aside with almost universal approval. No
law or institution, however venerable, that could not withstand
the cold test of utilitarian logic was safe from the iconoclasts. The
constitution was "lawyer ridden" and " aristocracy-ridden,* the
administration controlled by "sinister influences," the King him-
self 'the '"Corruptor-General." The reform of the electorate in
1832, of local government in 1834 and of the Poor Law in the
following year werfe seen as the first steps in the triumphant
advance to a pure and radical republic. Protective duties, religious
tests, the Established Church, marriage as a sacrament instead of a
contract, titles and dignities, the House of Lords and even the
Throne would ultimately be swept away. Macaulay wrote in
1833 that should the Lords oppose a certain popular Whig
measure, he "would not give 6d. for a coronet or a id. for a
mitre."

Yet for all its temporary enthusiasm for reform, England was
at heart a conservative country. It was also one in which vested
interests were numerous and powerful. At the head of the party
which espoused radical reform in Parliament were the historic
Whig nobles, who, though sympathetic to popular ideals of an
academic kind and always glad to dish the Tories, had no intention
of doing away with their own privilege and power to please a
few bourgeois doctrinaires. There was a pause—after the repeal
of the Corn Laws and the turn of the economic tide in the late
'forties a very marked pause—in the advance towards the utili-
tarian republic. During the ten years in which Lord Palmerston
was Prime Minister, the march on Utopia almost ceased.

But with the death of the old champion in 1865,an(^ t^ie succes-
sion of Gladstone to the Liberal leadership in the Commons, a
new era set in. The son of a Liverpool merchant, William Ewart
Gladstone was not, like his predecessors, a Whig aristocrat,
but a member of the vigorous middle-dass stock from which the
disciples of Bentham were mainly recruited, He had begun life