e self-love and social be the same."

The result of such ideas in the world of practice was a society which
was ruled by law, not by the caprice of Governments, but which
recognized no moral limitation on the pursuit by individuals of their
economic self-interest. In the world of thought, it was a political
philosophy which made rights the foundation of the social order, and
which considered the discharge of obligations, when it considered it at
all, as emerging by an inevitable process from their free exercise.
The first famous exponent of this philosophy was Locke, in whom the
dominant conception is the indefeasibility of private rights, not the
pre-ordained harmony between private rights and public welfare. In the
great French writers who prepared the way for the Revolution, while
believing that they were the servants of an enlightened absolutism,
there is an almost equal emphasis upon the sanctity of rights and upon
the infallibility of the {15} alchemy by which the pursuit of private
ends is transmuted into the attainment of public good. Though their
writings reveal the influence of the conception of society as a
self-adjusting mechanism, which afterwards became the most
characteristic note of the English individualism, what the French
Revolution burned into the mind of Europe was the former not the
latter. In England the idea of right had been negative and defensive,
a barrier to the encroachment of Governments. The French leapt to the
attack from trenches which the English had been content to defend, and
in France the idea became affirmative and militant, not a weapon of
defense, but a principle of social organization. The attempt to
refound society upon rights, and rights springing not from musty
charters, but from the very nature of man himself, was at once the
triumph and the limitation of the Revolution. It gave it the
enthusiasm and infectious power of religion.

What happened in England might seem at first sight to have been
precisely the reverse. English practical men, whose thoughts were
pitched in a lower key, were a little shocked by the pomp and
brilliance of that tremendous creed. They had scanty sympathy with the
absolute affirmations of France. What captured their imagination was
not the right to liberty, which made no appeal to their commercial
instincts, but the expediency of liberty, which did; and when the
Revolution had revealed the explosive power of the idea of natural
right, th