A second factor which contributed to the change of attitude towards the colonies was the growing influence of a new school of economic thought, the school of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus. Their ideas had begun to affect national policy as early as the twenties, when Huskisson took the first steps on the way to free trade. In the thirties the bulk of the trading and industrial classes had become converts to these ideas, which won their definite victories in the budgets of Sir Robert Peel, 1843-46, and in those of his disciple Gladstone. The essence of this doctrine, as it affected colonial policy, was that the regulation of trade by government, which had been the main object of the old colonial policy, brought no advantages, but only checked its free development. And for a country in the position which Britain then occupied, this was undeniably true; so overwhelming was her preponderance in world-trade that every current seemed to set in her direction, and the removal of artificial barriers, originally designed to train the current towards her shores, allowed it to follow its natural course. The only considerable opposition to this body of economic doctrine came from those who desired to protect British agriculture; but this motive had (at this period) no bearing upon colonial trade. The triumph of the doctrine of free trade meant that the principal motive which had earlier led to restrictions upon the self-government of the colonies--the desire to secure commercial advantages for the mother-country--was no longer operative. The central idea of the old colonial system was destroyed by the disciples of Adam Smith; and there no longer remained any apparent reason why the mother-country should desire to control the fiscal policy of the colonies. An even more important result of the adoption of this new economic doctrine was that it destroyed every motive which would lead the British government to endeavour to secure for British traders a monopoly of the traffic with British possessions. Henceforth all territories administered under the direct control of the home government were thrown open as freely to the merchants of other countries as to those of Britain herself. The part which Britain now undertook in the undeveloped regions of her empire (except in so far as they were controlled by fully self-governing colonies) was simply that of maintaining peace and law; and in these regions she adopted an attitude which may fairly be described as the attitude, not of a monopolist, but of a trustee for civilisation. It was this policy which explains the small degree of jealousy with which the rapid expansion of her territory was regarded by the rest of the civilised world. If the same policy had been followed, not necessarily at home, but in their colonial possessions, by all the colonising powers, the motives for colonial rivalry would have been materially diminished, and the claims of various states to colonial territories,