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 taken their place. Mr. Herbert Spencer, indeed, attempted to turn a single hasty generalisation from the history of biological evolution into a complete social philosophy of his own, and preached a 'beneficent private war'[2] which he conceived as exactly equivalent to that degree of trade competition which prevailed among English provincial shopkeepers about the year 1884. Mr. Spencer failed to secure even the whole-hearted support of the newspapers; but in so far as his system gained currency it helped further to discredit any attempt to connect political science with the study of human nature. [2] _Man versus the State_, p. 69. 'The beneficent private war which makes one man strive to climb over the shoulders of another man.'