shy of large programmes all cut out of one block, and preferred to consider each question on its
merits. In politics as in philosophy, they were tentative and experimental. Their opponents, on the
other hand, who thought they could "grasp this sorry scheme of things entire," were much more
willing to "shatter it to bits and then remould it nearer to the heart's desire." They might do this as
revolutionaries, or as men who wished to increase the authority of the powers that be; in either
case, they did not shrink from violence in pursuit of vast objectives, and they condemned love of
peace as ignoble.
The great political defect of Locke and his disciples, from a modern point of view, was their
worship of property. But those who criticized them on this account often did so in the interest of
classes that were more harmful than the capitalists, such as monarchs, aristocrats, and militarists.
The aristocratic landowner, whose income comes to him without effort and in accordance with
immemorial custom, does not think of himself as a money-grubber, and is not so thought of by
men who do not look below the picturesque surface. The business man, on the contrary, is
engaged in the conscious pursuit of wealth, and while his activities were more or less novel they
roused a resentment not felt towards the gentlemanly exactions of the landowner. That is to say,
this was the case with middle-class writers and those who read them; it was not the case with the
peasants, as appeared in the French and Russian Revolutions. But peasants are inarticulate.
Most of the opponents of Locke's school had an admiration for war, as being heroic and involving
a contempt for comfort and ease. Those who adopted a utilitarian ethic, on the contrary, tended to
regard most wars as folly. This, again, at least in the nineteenth century, brought them into
alliance with the capitalists, who disliked wars because they interfered with trade. The capitalists'
motive was, of course, pure self-interest, but it led to views more consonant with the general
interest than those of militarists and their literary supporters. The attitude of capitalists to war, it is
true, has fluctuated. England's wars of the eighteenth century, except the American war, were on
the whole profitable, and were supported by business men; but throughout the nineteenth century,
until its last years, they favoured peace. In modern times, big business, everywhere, has come into
such intimate relations with the national State that the