Conclusion
Not everyone who believed in free trade, which became a gospel, precluded acceptance of measures which social reformers were urging. Nor did the people influenced by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1882) consider that the State had no part to play in what came to be called social policy. The role of Benthamism in the evolution of 19th-century policy has been as controversial as the role of Peel and far more controversial than the role of Fabianism (the socialism of Sidney and Beatrice Webb) in the formation of 20th-century policy, culminating in the 'welfare state'. It was the important early 19th-century British political economists, Nassau Senior (1790-1864), one of the framers of the New Poor Law of 1834, who wrote that 'it is the duty of a government to do whatever is conducive to the welfare of the government'.
The British emphasis on reform rather than revolution, the desire to adapt institutions rather than to destroy them, seemed a national asset in the nineteenth century, but in the last decades of the twentieth century many writers in the media, including some historians, claimed that by not having a revolution in the nineteenth century Britain had suffered. In particular, old values of deference survived. Old institutions, like Parliament, the key to much else, should have been totally transformed. Tradition was a brake on progress.
Published: 2001-02-01
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