It was not until after the Peace--when Bentham and James Mill were in full vigor, and soon to be reinforced by Austin, Villiers, John Stuart Mill, Roebuck, Grote, Ricardo, and others--that Political Economy became a force in England. The motive and enthusiasm for the new science undoubtedly came from the Utilitarian ethics. If the sole masters of man were pleasure and pain, the knowledge of the natural laws expressing the course of social action, and thus regulating pleasure and pain, became of vital importance. If it is God’s will, as Paley and Austin asserted, that men should seek for happiness, than the study of how to obtain economic comfort becomes a sacred duty, and has ever been so regarded by such rational divines as Malthus, Chalmers, Maurice, Kingsley, and the young High Church party of to-day. Christianity and the course of modern thought began to join hands; and we may see in Bishop Berkeley and Paley the forerunners of such a development as the Guild of St. Matthew.[28] The Utilitarian philosophy, besides aiding in the popularization of economic science, strongly influenced its early character. The tendency to _Laisser Faire_ inherited from the country and century of upheaval and revolt against authority, was fostered by Bentham’s destructive criticism of all the venerable relics of the past. What is the use of it, he asked, of every shred of social institution then existing. What is the net result of its being upon individual happiness? Few of the laws and customs--little, indeed, of the social organization of that time could stand this test. England was covered with rotten survivals from bygone circumstances; the whole administration was an instrument for class domination and parasite nurture; the progress of the industrial revolution was rapidly making obsolete all laws, customs, proverbs, maxims, and nursery tales; and the sudden increase of population was baffling all expectations and disconcerting all arrangements. At last it came to be carelessly accepted as the teaching both of philosophy and of experience that every man must fight for himself; and “the devil take the hindmost” became the accepted social creed of what was still believed to be a Christian nation. Utilitarianism became the Protestantism of Sociology, and “how to make for self and family the best of both worlds” was assumed to be the duty, as it certainly was the aim, of every practical Englishman. THE INTELLECTUAL AND MORAL REVOLT, AND ITS POLITICAL OUTCOME.