most cases one cannot even discover whether the writer is conscious of
possessing any conception of human nature at all.

[1] _Political, Economy_ (in the _Encyclopedia Metropolitana_), 2nd
edition (1850), p. 26.

It is easy to understand how this has come about. Political science is
just beginning to regain some measure of authority after the
acknowledged failure of its confident professions during the first half
of the nineteenth century. Bentham's Utilitarianism, after superseding
both Natural Right and the blind tradition of the lawyers, and serving
as the basis of innumerable legal and constitutional reforms throughout
Europe, was killed by the unanswerable refusal of the plain man to
believe that ideas of pleasure and pain are the only sources of human
motive. The 'classical' political economy of the universities and the
newspapers, the political economy of MacCulloch and Senior and
Archbishop Whately, was even more unfortunate in its attempt to deduce a
whole industrial polity from a 'few simple principles' of human nature.
It became identified with the shallow dogmatism by which well-to-do
people in the first half of Queen Victoria's reign tried to convince
working men that any change in the distribution of the good things of
life was 'scientifically impossible.' Marx and Buskin and Carlyle were
masters of sarcasm, and the process is not yet forgotten by which they
slowly compelled even the newspapers to abandon the 'laws of political
economy' which from 1815 to 1870 stood, like gigantic stuffed policemen,
on guard over rent and profits.

When the struggle against 'Political Economy' was at its height,
Darwin's _Origin of Species_ revealed a universe in which the 'few
simple principles' seemed a little absurd, and nothing has hitherto