The total contribution of the Whigs to Liberalism was very large. They had declared that government, national and local, was to be no longer the business of a class, but the interest of the people as a whole; that no form of religious opinion was to be appreciated at the expense of another; that no man should be allowed to have property in the body of another; that land should not be privileged against goods in relation to legal debts, and that landowners should not be privileged against landless men in relation to the killing of game; that employers and parents should not be allowed to dispose of the health and happiness of children; that the English people should not be permitted to regulate the domestic concerns of one of their colonies. Much remained to be done. The middle class was admitted to political power, but the working class was not. Catholics and Dissenters were no longer practically disabled by the Church, but both were still depreciated by the establishment of the rival sect, and the Jew {186} was still excluded from Parliament and office by the Christian. Land was still privileged by the Corn Law as against industry, and particular industries as against the public by the protective tariff. The poor working man was still liable to be abused by his wealthy employer. If the Colonies were emancipated, Ireland was not. The condition of women had not been improved, or even considered. Some of these reforms were simply applications of old Whig theories about the responsibility of Government to the people and the toleration of heterodox opinions. A Whig of 1688 would have understood the ideas which lay beneath the Reform Act, the Canadian Constitution, the repeal of the Test Act, and Catholic Emancipation, even if he had disliked the particular expression of them. Other reforms were novel not only in themselves, but also as implying a new attitude of mind, a new conception of the relations between the State and society. The education scheme and the Factory Act meant that men were ceasing to look upon the State as something external to the people, a thing which was contrived simply to protect individual human beings from being injured either by foreign invaders or by domestic law-breakers. They were beginning to look upon it as an engine which might be put to positive as well as to negative use, which might be employed to strike off fetters as well as to prevent their imposition, which might be consciously directed towards improving a man's natural capacity as well as towards allowing it free play. It was a long time before these ideas received much fuller expression. Political power remained in the hands of classes who required little assistance of this sort for themselves, and were incapable of seeing how urgently it was needed by others. Until the Reform Act of 1867 had transferred power to the working classes the new conception of the State was only rarely and unsystematically expressed in legislation. In the meantime the landed