It is only within the last two decades that we have begun to understand the inner significance of the protest against this economic liberalism. Adam Smith had declared the source of value to lie in labor; and, at the moment of its deepest agony, there were men willing to point the moral of his tale. That it represented an incautious analysis was, for them, unimportant beside the fact that it opened once more a path whereby economics could be reclaimed for moral science. For if labor was the source of value, as Bray and Thompson pointed out, it seemed as though degradation was the sole payment for its services. They did not ask whether the organization they envisaged was economically profitable, but whether it was ethically right. No one can read the history of these years and fail to understand their uncompromising denial of its rightness. Their negation fell upon unheeding ears; but twenty years later, the tradition for which they stood came into Marx's hands and was fashioned by him into an interpretation of history. With all its faults of statement and of emphasis, the doctrine of the English socialists has been, in later hands, the most fruitful hypothesis of modern politics. It was a deliberate effort, upon the basis of Adam Smith's ideas, to create a commonwealth in the interests of the masses. Wealth, in its view, was less the mere production of goods than the accumulated happiness of humble men. The impulses it praised and sought through state-action to express were, indeed, different from those upon which Smith laid emphasis; and he would doubtless have stood aghast at the way in which his thought was turned to ends of which he did not dream. Yet he can hardly have desired a greater glory. He thus made possible not only knowledge of a State untrammelled in its economic life by moral considerations; but also the road to those categories wherein the old conception of co-operative effort might find a new expression. Those who trod in his footsteps may have repudiated the ideal for which he stood, but they made possible a larger hope in which he would have been proud and glad to share. BIBLIOGRAPHY This bibliography makes no pretence to completeness. It attempts only to enumerate the more obvious sources that an interested reader would care to examine. GENERAL LESLIE STEPHEN. _History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century_. 1876. Vol. II, Chapters IX and X. W.E.H. LECKY. _History of England in the Eighteenth Century._ A.L. SMITH. _Political Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries_ in the _Cambridge Modern History_. Vol. VI, Chapter XXIII. J. BONAR. _Philosophy and Political Economy_. Chapters V-IX. F.W. MAITLAND. _An Historical Sketch of Liberty and Equality_ in _Collected Papers_. Vol. I. CHAPTER II JOHN LOCKE. _Works_ (Eleventh Edition), 10 volumes. London, 1812. H.R. FOX-BOURNE. _Life of John Locke_. London, 1876.