868 REPORT—1896. 
evils of improvidence. Jevons was not content to condemn the doles of past 
testators ; he wanted the reorganisation of the Hospital service of our towns, so that 
as far, at least, as the ordinary and inevitable casualties of sickness and accident are 
concerned, they might be met by the co-operation of workers inspired by motives 
of self-reliance instead of by ever open gratuitous service making forethought un- 
necessary and even foolish. In this connection it may be noticed that while giving 
a hearty welcome to Mr. Forster’s Education Act, passed in the same year that he 
spoke, he noted with satisfaction that primary education had not been made gra- 
tuitous so as to take away another support of prudence. It is strange, too, in the 
light of our recent experience, to find him regretting that the task of remodelling 
local taxation had not been undertaken, so that local wants might be met by a just 
apportionment of their charge and the principles of association of the members of 
local communities placed on a firmer basis. 
It will be seen that what really occupied the mind of my predecessor was the 
apparent slow success of Economic thinkers in influencing political action, and 
we, looking back over the intervening twenty-six years, have certainly no more 
cause of congratulation than he felt ; we are forced to ask ourselves the same ques- 
tion what is the reason of our apparent failure; we are driven to examine anew 
whether our principles are faulty and incomplete or whether the difficulties in their 
acceptance, they being sound, lie in the prejudices of popular feeling which politi- 
cians are more ready to gratify than to correct. 
I do not pause to meet the charges of inhumanity or immorality which have in 
other times been brought against Economists. Jevons pleaded for the benevolence 
of Malthus, who might indeed be presumed, as an English clergyman, to be not 
altogether inhuman or immoral. In truth everyone who has ever had any thought 
about social or fiscal legislation—and we have had such laws among ourselves for 
five centuries—everyone who has ever tried to influence the currents of foreign 
trade—and such attempts date from an equally remote past—has been moved by some 
train of economic reasoning, and must strictly be classified as an Economist ; and 
the only difference between such men and those who are more usually recognised 
by the name is that the latter have attempted to carry their thoughts a little 
further, and have been more busy to examine the links of their own reasoning and 
the soundness of their conclusions. The men who attempted to fix wages, to limit 
the numbers in special trades, to prohibit or to compel certain specific exports, all 
had some notion that they were engaged in doing something to strengthen if not 
to improve the better organisation of communities. Even the aims which appear 
to us most selfish were disguised as embodying social necessities, But by the 
beginning of the present reign it may be said that the study of Political Economy 
in this country had worked itself free from earlier errors, and it had come to be 
believed that the secret of social regeneration lay in the utmost allowance of free- 
dom of action to every individual of the community, so far at least as that action 
affected himself, coupled with the most complete development of the principle of 
self-reliance, so as to bring home to every member, freed from legal restraint on 
his liberty of action, the moral responsibility of self-support and of discharging the 
duties, present and to come, of his special position. With this education of 
the individual in self-reliance, and with this liberation of the same individual in 
the conduct of life, it was held that by certain, if slow, stages the condition 
+ the ‘ sepamshan would be improved, and a wholesome reorganisation naturally 
effected. 
Whatever view we may now hold of this belief, whether we must discard it as 
incomplete or even erroneous, or whether we remain strong in the conviction of its 
intrinsic soundness and in the possibility of realising the hopes it offered, it must 
still be evident that those who professed it were imbued with the deepest interest 
in the well-being of their fellow creatures, and that the aim of all their speculations 
was the purification of social life, and its healthy and abundant development. 
Such was the theory more or less openly expressed by Economie thinkers when 
the British Association was founded, and the same theory, as I conceive, lay at the 
base of Jevons’s address in 1870. Can we hold it now, or must it be recast ? 
Since 1870 Primary Education has practically been made gratuitous. The 
