decision which grew out of the blundering obscurantism of the King
enabled Burke nobly to restate and amply to revivify the principles of
1688. Chatham meanwhile had stumbled upon a vaster empire; and the
industrial system which his effort quickened could not live under an
economic régime which still bore traces of the narrow nationalism of the
Tudors. No man was so emphatically representative of his epoch as Adam
Smith; and no thinker has ever stated in such generous terms the answer
of his time to the most vital of its questions. The answer, indeed, like
all good answers, revealed rather the difficulty of the problem than the
prospect of its solution; though nothing so clearly heralded the new age
that was coming than his repudiation of the past in terms of a real
appreciation of it. The American War and the two great revolutions
brought a new race of thinkers into being. The French seed at last
produced its harvest. Bentham absorbed the purpose of Rousseau even
while he rejected his methods. For a time, indeed, the heat and dust of
war obscured the issue that Bentham raised. But the certainties of the
future lay on his side.




CHAPTER II

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION



I