the seventeenth, though Law and Bishop Wilson and the Wesleyan revival
will make us generalize with caution. But the truth was that theological
ethics had become empty and inadequate, and the problem was therefore
urgent. That is why Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith--to take
only men of the first eminence--were thinking not less for politics than
for ethics when they sought to justify the ways of man to man. For all
of them saw that a theory of society is impossible without the provision
of psychological foundations; and those must, above all, result in a
theory of conduct if the social bond is to be maintained. That sure
insight is, of course, one current only in a greater English stream
which reaches back to Hobbes at its source and forward to T.H. Green at
perhaps its fullest. Its value is its denial of politics as a science
distinct from other human relations; and that is why Adam Smith can
write of moral sentiments no less than of the wealth of nations. The
eighteenth century saw clearly that each aspect of social life must find
its place in the political equation.

Yet it is undoubtedly an age of methods rather than of principles; and,
as such its peaceful prosperity was well suited to its questions.
Problems of technique, such as the cabinet and the Bank of England
required the absence of passionate debate if they were in any fruitful
fashion to be solved. Nor must the achievement of the age in politics be
minimized. It was, of course, a complacent time; but we ought to note
that foreigners of distinction did not wonder at its complacency.
Voltaire and Montesquieu look back to England in the eighteenth century
for the substance of political truths. The American colonies took alike
their methods and their arguments from English ancestors; and Burke
provided them with the main elements of justification. The very
quietness, indeed, of the time was the natural outcome of a century of
storm; and England surely had some right to be contented when her
political system was compared with the governments of France and
Germany. Not, indeed, that the full fruit of the Revolution was
gathered. The principle of consent came, in practice and till 1760, to
mean the government of the Whig Oligarchy; and the _Extraordinary Black
Book_ remains to tell us what happened when George III gave the Tory
party a new lease of power. There is throughout the time an
over-emphasis upon the value of order, and a not unnatural tendenc