from: T**he Spirit of Conservatism. by Arthur Bryant, published by Methuen & Company Ltd., London. 1929. p17-20.
In the 17th century, the Cavalier Party endeavoured to preserve the ancient happiness and good humor of England against the radical zeal of the reforming Puritan, who, bent as ever on some vision of theoretical virtue, regarded the games and customs of the people with horror, felt every laugh to be an insult to his gloomy theology, and saw in the village maidens, dancing on the green in the evening, the enemies of his God. When in 1714 the Tory party went into exile the people suffered. For when, at the end of the 18th century, the doctrines of a new social and economic Radicalism captured the imagination of the governing and middle class, there was no real Tory Party to defend the ancient liberties and privileges of the people. Hitherto the old Conservative tradition of government had secured for the people a state regulation of wages, hours and industry that regarded the health and happiness of the nation as its first duty, and which protected them from the selfishness of any too powerful class or individual.
The revolutionary theory of the later 18th century was another manifestation of that theoretical Will-o’-the-Wisp which Radicalism can never resist. “Man is born free” it proclaimed; “everywhere he is in chains. Loose the chains; break the shackles of old laws and institutions and of the whole social organism into which man is born, and leave him absolutely free to do whatever he pleases; then the imperfection of his nature will vanish, and man and woman will appear, perfect and radiant creatures, walking together as Adam and Eve in the garden of innocence.” In other words, give a rein to all the evil and selfish passions of man, that centuries of slowly established law and order have held in check, and let the Devil take the hindmost. For, as the upshot was to show, humankind left to its own devices, without check or restraint, is not Prospero and Miranda but Caliban and Sycorax.
In the world of Economics, the same Radical theory meant that the State must no longer legislate to preserve the health and happiness of the people, to ensure the predominance of a contented and prosperous agricultural community, to regulate wages and conditions of industry, for to do so would be to impose restrictions on the right of the individual to do whatever he liked. One law only was to govern the world – the economic law of supply and demand; in other words, the Law of Might is Right. If a rich man, with bread in his hand, was to offer it to his starving neighbours on condition that they should for all practical purposes become his slaves, he was free to make and enforce that bargain. This was one aspect of the famous doctrine of Laissez-Faire. It was a return to the savage law of the jungle, out of which man had so slowly and painfully climbed. Such was the new conception of freedom, a thing utterly unlike the ancient and ordered liberty of England.
While the dogma of the Radical philosophers was running like wildfire through the minds of the more speculative members of the upper and middle classes, a vast social revolution was transforming the lives of the people of England. Towards the end of the 18th century, a Glasgow mechanic of idle and irregular habits, but of pregnant brain, discovered the application of steam power to industry. In many parts of England, within fifty amazing years, the lives and surrounding of the inhabitants were completely changed. Boys brought up in South Lancashire villages in the early years of George III’s reign, amid conditions that suggested the solitude and spaciousness of Piers Plowman’s England, with no sounds but those of the lark and the threshing in the great cornfield, with the contours of the Derbyshire hills to the south and the Lake Mountains to the north, visible clearly across the unclouded atmosphere of summer, saw before old age was reached a Lancashire beyond their wildest dreams, where men earned their livelihood from the loom and not the plough, where the air was dark and tainted with the smoke of a thousand mill chimneys, and where in streets of mean and monotonous hovels, amid the sound of steam and forge, men and women multiplied tenfold to inherit a world of slavery. The age of economic freedom, the Radical’s dream, had come.
For while coal, steam, forge and wheel were transforming the economic structure of society, the new doctrine ruled; “Break the laws that forbid man to do and bargain as he pleases, give to the strong and fearless absolute liberty to buy the labour of the weak and the poor in the cheapest market (Starvation Fair) and sell the fruits of that labour in the dearest; loose the reins, Laissez-Faire, let go.” Those who wish to study the logical result of that doctrine, applied and triumphant for nearly a century of English history, should go to the slums of any great city and look around: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice.”