than by the exercise on the part of the people of a more individual and
less subservient intellectual and moral energy. In so doing she has for
the time being renounced one of the greatest advantages of a national
political and social organization--the advantage of combining great
popular energy with loyalty and fertility of association. No doubt
certain nations, because of their perilous international situation, may
be obliged to sacrifice the moral and economic individuality of the
people to the demands of political security and efficiency. But Great
Britain suffered from no such necessity. After the fall of Napoleon, she
was more secure from foreign interference than ever before in her
history; and she could have afforded, with far less risk than France, to
identify her national principle with the work of popular liberation and
amelioration. As a matter of fact, the logic of the reform movement
which began in England soon after the Treaty of Vienna, required the
adoption by England either of more democracy or of less. The privileged
classes should either have fought to preserve their peculiar
responsibility for the national welfare, or else, if they were obliged
to surrender their inherited leadership, they should have also
surrendered their political and social privileges. But Englishmen,
terrified by the disasters which French democratic nationalism had
wrought upon France, preferred domestic harmony to the perils of any
radical readjustment of the balance of their national life. The
aristocracy and the middle classes compromised their differences; and in
the compromise each of them sacrificed the principle upon which the
vitality of its action as a class depended, while both of them combined
to impose subordination on the mass of the people.

Englishmen have, it is true, always remained faithful to their dominant
political idea--the idea of freedom, and the English political and
economic system is precisely the example of the ultimate disadvantage of
basing national cohesion upon the application of such a limited
principle. This principle, as we have seen in the preceding chapter,
always operates for the benefit of a minority, whose whole object, after
they have once won certain peculiar advantages, is to secure their
perpetuation. The wealthy middle class, which at one time was the
backbone of the Liberal party, has for the most part gone over to the
Conservatives, because its interest has become as much opposed