CHAPTER IV
‘laissez-faire’
The school of Cobden is affiliated in general outlook both to the doctrine of natural liberty and to the discipline of Bentham. It shared with the Benthamites the thoroughly practical attitude dear to the English mind. It has much less to say of natural rights than the French theorists. On the other hand, it is saturated with the conviction that the unfettered action of the individual is the mainspring of all progress.[1] Its starting-point is economic. Trade is still in fetters. The worst of the archaic internal restrictions have,
- ↑ “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 school of Cobden from that of the Benthamites.
