Cobdenism is, after all, nothing but the abandonment of trade
to Circumstantial Selection.
It is hardly possible to exaggerate the importance of this preparation
for Darwinism by a vast political and clerical propaganda of its moral
atmosphere. Never in history, as far as we know, had there been such a
determined, richly subsidized, politically organized attempt to persuade
the human race that all progress, all prosperity, all salvation,
individual and social, depend on an unrestrained conflict for food and
money, on the suppression and elimination of the weak by the strong,
on Free Trade, Free Contract, Free Competition, Natural Liberty,
Laisser-faire: in short, on 'doing the other fellow down' with impunity,
all interference by a guiding government, all organization except police
organization to protect legalized fraud against fisticuffs, all
attempt to introduce human purpose and design and forethought into the
industrial welter, being 'contrary to the laws of political economy.'
Even the proletariat sympathized, though to them Capitalist liberty
meant only wage slavery without the legal safeguards of chattel slavery.
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