74.6 
LAISSEZ FAIRE 
material wealth might be produced, but not to discuss the 
uses to which it should be applied ; he was prepared to show 
on what principles it was distributed among the various 
individuals who formed the nation, and to leave the question 
of consumption to each personally. But philanthropic senti- 
ment and religious enthusiasm were not content to leave the 
matter there, and public opinion was gradually roused to 
demand that practical statesmen and their expert advisers 
should look farther ahead. Under the influence of these 
fader eo larger views, John Stuart Mill gave a new turn to economic 
John study. He was not satisfied with discussing mere material 
Soars progress. He could contemplate a stationary state with 
calmness; he could not but dwell with bitterness on the 
great misery which accompanied increasing wealth; and he 
tried to formulate an ideal of human welfare in his chapter 
On the Probable Futurity of the Working Classes’. In this 
way he succeeded in indicating an end towards which the new 
material resources might be directed, and thus restored to 
Economics that practical side, which it had been in danger of 
losing since the time of Ricardo. It is important that we 
should have a method for isolating economic phenomena and 
analysing them as accurately as may be, and this Ricardo has 
given us; but it is also desirable that we should be able to 
turn our knowledge to account,—to see some end at which it 
is worth while to aim, and to choose the means which will 
conduce towards it; this we can do better, not merely in- 
tuitively and by haphazard, but on reasoned grounds, since 
the attempt was first made by Mill. 
The change was not only noticeable in the economic 
literature of the day, it comes out clearly in the work of the 
Legislature. Under the guidance of the laissez faire school 
Parliament had been inclined to hold its hand altogether, lest 
its action should only work mischief. The dominant party 
were satisfied, in accordance with the views of experts, to 
provide the conditions which tended to the most rapid 
material progress, in the expectation that if they sought this 
first, all other things would be added thereto, gradually and 
indirectly. From the time of the Peace of 1815 onwards, 
however, and more obviously in the Reformed Parliament, 
became dis 
satisfied 
with the 
mere con- 
stderation 
of means 
\ Principles of Political Economy, Bk. Iv. c. 7.