But nothing is more certain in the history of political philosophy than that the problem of freedom changes with each age. The nineteenth century sought release from political privilege; and it built its success upon the system prepared by its predecessor. It can never be too greatly emphasized that in each age the substance of liberty will be found in what the dominating forces of that age most greatly want. With Locke, with Smith, with Hegel and with Marx, the ultimate hypothesis is always the summary of some special experience universalized. That does not mean that the past is worthless. Politics, as Seeley said, are vulgar unless they are liberalized by history; and a state which failed to see itself as a mosaic of ancestral institutions would build its novelties upon foundations of sand. Suspicions of collective effort in the eighteenth century ought not to mean suspicion in the twentieth; to think in such fashion is to fall into the error for which Lassalle so finely criticized Hegel. It is as though one were to confound the accidental phases of the history of property with the philosophic basis of property itself. From such an error it is the task of history above all to free us. For it records the ideals and doubts of earlier ages as a perennial challenge to the coming time. The rightness of this attitude admits of proof in terms of the double tradition to which Adam Smith gave birth. On the one hand he is the founder of the classic political economy. With Ricardo, the elder Mill and Nassau Senior, the main preoccupation is the production of wealth without regard to its moral environment; and the state for them is merely an engine to protect the atmosphere in which business men achieve their labors. There is nothing in them of that fine despair which made Stuart Mill welcome socialism itself rather than allow the continuance of the new capitalist system. Herein the State is purged of moral purpose; and the utilitarian method achieves the greatest happiness by insisting that the technique of production must dominate all other circumstances. Until the Reform Act of 1867, the orthodox economists remained unchallenged. The use of the franchise was only beginning to be understood. The "new model" of trade unionism had not yet been tested in the political field. But it was discovered impossible to act any longer upon the assumptions of the abstract economic man. The infallible sense of his own interest was discovered to be without basis in the facts for the simple reason that the instruments of his perception obviously required training if they were to be applied to a complex world. Individualism, in the old, utilitarian sense, passed away because it failed to build a State wherein a channel of expression might be found for the creative energies of humble men.