The policy thus expounded by Fox was not a mere creed of pounds, shillings, and pence. The Manchester School is often denounced alternately as cold-hearted and material and as warmhearted and sentimental, of sacrificing at one time humanity to trade and at another national interests to a feeble love of peace. It in fact combined an intense moral earnestness with a degree of plain good sense which has never been surpassed. It is, on the one hand, largely due to the efforts of the School that ideas of international unity have supplanted the old ideas of the balance of international hostilities. But their whole programme--Free Trade, peace, non-intervention, reduction of armaments, retrenchment, arbitration, and colonial self-government--might have been, and in suitable circumstances always was, urged on grounds of convenience and interest. Both the Peace Society and Mr. Norman Angell are descended politically from the Manchester School, and without the union of the two forces, moral and economic, the School would have effected little. No popular agitation can ever succeed without an appeal to a moral sense, good or bad. Cobden and Bright and the other Manchester men saw, what the men of the world who differ from them never see, that in politics, as in all life, your ultimate interest coincides with morality. Honesty, if it had no virtue in itself, would still be the best policy. It is as {193} true among nations as among individuals that material good is achieved most easily and maintained most securely by treating your neighbour as you would have him treat you. Interference, boasting, hostile tariffs, regulating the affairs of a nation without regard to the feelings of its members, all mean unrest, expense, heavy taxation, and perhaps war. Order and peace are essential to prosperity, and order and peace can only be secured by moral conduct. Even the dullest economic programmes were thus touched by the Manchester men with moral fire. "I see in the Free Trade policy," said Cobden, "that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe--drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace."[236] The hope was sanguine, and its realization will not come yet. But it is only by hopes like this that the world has ever been moved. We advance by the labours of those who identify interest with morality, and not of those who calculate morality in terms of interest. To domestic and foreign policy alike the Manchester School gave a tone which they had never possessed before. The international ideas of the French Revolution, thus identified with national interest, were by them made part of the inheritance of Liberalism.