ay be
marshalled into trusts or other combinations for the private advantage
against the public interest. Such combinations, predicted by Karl Marx
as the appointed means of dissolving the competitive system, have been
kept at bay in this country by Free Trade. Under Protection they
constitute the most urgent problem of the day. Even here the railways,
to take one example, are rapidly moving to a system of combination, the
economies of which are obvious, while its immediate result is monopoly,
and its assured end is nationalization.

Thus individualism, when it grapples with the facts, is driven no small
distance along Socialist lines. Once again we have found that to
maintain individual freedom and equality we have to extend the sphere of
social control. But to carry through the real principles of Liberalism,
to achieve social liberty and living equality of rights, we shall have
to probe still deeper. We must not assume any of the rights of property
as axiomatic. We must look at their actual working and consider how they
affect the life of society. We shall have to ask whether, if we could
abolish all monopoly on articles of limited supply, we should yet have
dealt with all the causes that contribute to social injustice and
industrial disorder, whether we should have rescued the sweated worker,
afforded to every man adequate security for a fair return for an honest
day's toil, and prevented the use of economic advantage to procure gain
for one man at the expense of another. We should have to ask whether we
had the basis of a just delimitation between the rights of the community
and those of the individual, and therewith a due appreciation of the
appropriate ends of the State and the equitable basis of taxation. These
inquiries take us to first principles, and to approach that part of our
discussion it is desirable to carry further our sketch of the historic
development of Liberalism in thought and action.

FOOTNOTES:

[7] "If I were asked to sum up in a sentence the difference and the
connection (between the two schools) I would say that the Manchester men
were the disciples of Adam Smith and Bentham, while the Philosophical
Radicals followed Bentham and Adam Smith" (F. W. Hirst, _The Manchester
School_, Introd., p. xi). Lord Morley, in the concluding chapter of his
_Life of Cobden_, points out that it was the view of "policy as a whole"
in connection with the economic movement of society which distinguished
the sch