It is curious to note that not even the impact of defeat gives this lesson its proper perspective to the defeated. English Liberalism has suffered eclipse because, broadly speaking, it was unable to discover an industrial philosophy suitable to the wants of the new electorate. It served admirably the requirements of the manufacturer and the shopkeeper who were enfranchised in 1832. It gave them freedom of trade, liberty of contract and full religious toleration. But it never understood either the fact of trade unionism or the philosophy of trade unionism. Its attitude to citizenship was atomic in character. It saw the community as a government on the one side, and a mass of discrete individuals on the other. It assumed that each of these, given liberation from the special privilege of the _ancien régime_, had the full means of happiness at his disposal; it accepted, in a word, the principles of Benthamite radicalism as absolute. But its error was not to see that the community is not merely a mass of discrete individuals. Jones is not merely Jones, but also a miner, a railwayman, a cotton operative, an engineer. As one of these, he has interests to be jointly promoted and jointly realized. A philosophy of politics that is to work must find a full place in the state for organized workers to whom freedom in the industrial sphere is, in its fullest implications, as urgent and as imperative as freedom in the sphere of politics or religion. The Liberal Party did not see this until it was too late. Built largely on the support of the Nonconformist business man, the interests it understood were essentially his interests; and to recognize the implications of trade unionism, as Keir Hardie and his colleagues did, was to invade the interests upon which it was able to count for allegiance. It was forced, obviously unwillingly, into concessions like the Trades Disputes Act of 1906; but its policy, as the detailed history of the process of social legislation from 1906 to 1914 makes clear was, so far as it could, to mitigate social inequality by recognition of individual claims, and to build machinery for their satisfaction which continued to neglect the fact of trade unionism. When, after the war, the remarkable growth of the Labour Party showed how vast was the decline of the Liberal hold upon the working-classes, the Liberal leaders were driven, by the need of self-preservation, to the invention of industrial principles likely to prove attractive to trade unionists. But these wore the air of being produced for the occasion; and they did not fit into the character of Liberal Leadership. For the latter was quite unable to attract to its ranks either working-men candidates or trade union support; and the emphatic declaration of a Liberal politician that his party could not join the ranks of Labour because the latter was built upon the trade unions showed how unreal was the body of industrial principles