A Short History of English Liberalism

CHAPTER		PAGE
I.	Liberalism and Toryism	[7]
II.	Political Conditions in the Reign of George III	[42]
III.	The First Movement towards Liberalism	[69]
IV.	The French Revolution and English Opinion	[100]
V.	The Decline of Toryism	[142]
VI.	The Middle-Class Supremacy	[168]
VII.	The Manchester School and Palmerston	[190]
VIII.	The Beginning of the Gladstone Period	[230]
IX.	Gladstone versus Disraeli	[265]
X.	The Imperialist Reaction	[294]
XI.	Liberalism since 1906	[324]

CHAPTER I

LIBERALISM AND TORYISM

This book attempts to trace the varying but persistent course of Liberalism in British politics during the last hundred and fifty years. It is not so much a history of events as a reading of them in the light of a particular political philosophy. In the strict sense a history of Liberalism should cover much more than politics. The same habit of mind is to be discovered everywhere else in the history of thought, most conspicuously in religious history, but not less certainly in the history of science and of art. The general victory in these innumerable conflicts of opinion has been to Liberalism, and the movement of the race, during the period with which the writer is concerned, is precisely measured by the degree in which the Liberal spirit has succeeded in modifying the establishments of the preceding age. The object of this book is to investigate the course of that process of modification in politics.

By Liberalism I mean, not a policy, but a habit of mind. It is the disposition of the man who looks upon each of his fellows as of equal worth with himself. He does not assume that all men and women are of equal capacity, or equally entitled to offices and privileges. But he is always inclined to leave and to give them equal opportunity with himself for self-expression and for self-development. He assumes, as the basis of his activity, that he has no right to interfere with any other person's attempts

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