ey sought some less menacing formula. It had been offered
them first by Adam Smith and his precursors, who showed how the
mechanism of economic life {16} converted "as with an invisible hand,"
the exercise of individual rights into the instrument of public good.
Bentham, who despised metaphysical subtleties, and thought the
Declaration of the Rights of Man as absurd as any other dogmatic
religion, completed the new orientation by supplying the final
criterion of political institutions in the principle of Utility.
Henceforward emphasis was transferred from the right of the individual
to exercise his freedom as he pleased to the expediency of an
undisturbed exercise of freedom to society.

The change is significant. It is the difference between the universal
and equal citizenship of France, with its five million peasant
proprietors, and the organized inequality of England established
solidly upon class traditions and class institutions; the descent from
hope to resignation, from the fire and passion of an age of illimitable
vistas to the monotonous beat of the factory engine, from Turgot and
Condorcet to the melancholy mathematical creed of Bentham and Ricardo
and James Mill. Mankind has, at least, this superiority over its
philosophers, that great movements spring from the heart and embody a
faith; not the nice adjustments of the hedonistic calculus. So in the
name of the rights of property France abolished in three years a great
mass of property rights which, under the old regime had robbed the
peasant of part of the produce of his labor, and the social
transformation survived a whole world of political changes. In England
the glad tidings of democracy were broken too discreetly to reach the
ears of the hind in the furrow or the shepherd on the hill; {17} there
were political changes without a social transformation. The doctrine
of Utility, though trenchant in the sphere of politics, involved no
considerable interference with the fundamentals of the social fabric.
Its exponents were principally concerned with the removal of political
abuses and legal anomalies. They attacked sinecures and pensions and
the criminal code and the procedure of the law courts. But they
touched only the surface of social institutions. They thought it a
monstrous injustice that the citizen should pay one-tenth of his income
in taxation to an idle Government, but quite reasonable that he should
pay one-fifth of it in rent to an idle la