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 A SKETCH OF SOCIALISTIC THOUGHT IN ENGLAND 645

measures brought in by the Reform Parliament was the Municipal Reform Act (1835) the ^ rst great step in local government.

Ib. 1832-1848. This period includes the continued activities of Owen, who was now largely dissipating his energies in commu- nity schemes, though he also happily demonstrated in the Labor ExcJiange the futility of the doctrine that labor is the sole source of value, taught by Francis Place, 1 William Thomson, Owen, and later by Marx. The chief new actors are Coleridge, Shaftesbury, and Cobden.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the prime inspiration of the early Christian socialist movement. He provided Maurice with some of his chief social doctrines. He accepted the organic conception of society. He criticised the aggressions of capital. He denounced the accepted political economy, espe- cially Malthusianism. He placed citizenship before Christianity. Two quotations will suggest the advisability of consulting his writings in a study of the crude socialism of the broad church- men. In a conversation with Harriet Martineau "he avowed that there were points on which we differed (I was full of wonder that there were any on which we agreed). For instance, said he, you appear to consider that society is an aggregate of indi- viduals. I replied that I certainly did, whereupon he went off on one of the several metaphysical interpretations which maybe put upon the many-sided fact of an organized human society, subject to natural laws in virtue of its aggregate character and organiza- tion together." In his Second Lay Sermon, p. 414, he gives as the positive ends of the state : (i) "To make the means of sub- sistence more easy to each individual. (2) To secure to each of its members the hope of bettering his own condition or that of his children. (3) The development of those faculties which are essential to his humanity, that is, to his rational and moral being." The state which Coleridge has in mind is an aristocratic one, and his social philosophy is consequently paternalistic, but

WALLAS, G. Francis Place, Longmans* (in press).

HARRIET MARTINEAU, Autobiography, 1,397-8. Compare COLERIDGE, The Friend, 161.