But it would be hard to find any corner of our public ...

But it would be hard to find any corner of our public life where the spirit of Bentham is not working to-day. It is dangerous to force historic movements into exaggerated symmetry.

But the parallel operation of Evangelicalism and Utilitarianism cannot be ignored.

Their classics, Malthus on Population and Wilberforce's Practical View, appeared almost simultaneously, one in 1797, the other in 1798. Their greatest victories in public affairs, the Abolition of Slavery and the Reform of the Poor Law, were won in 1833 and 1834. When a distracted Government threw the Old Poor Law at a Royal Commission, the Benthamites rose to the height of their opportunity.

The Secretary of the Commission was Edwin Chadwick, who the Patriarch had selected to be his apostle to the new age, and in his hands there was no fear lest the faith should grow cold. Born in 1800, in a Lancashire farmhouse where the children were washed all over, every day, the mainspring of Chadwick's career seems to have been a desire to wash the people of England all over, every day, by administrative order.