Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/57

 assistance as I could, while Ramsay MacDonald was secretary, and Herbert Samuel an active worker and supporter, with Charles Trevelyan and Richard Stapley aiding and abetting in the enterprise. Samuel I first came into contact with when, as a candidate for one of the Oxfordshire Divisions, he was giving his attention to projects of land reform, and generally preparing himself for the active political career of after years. His close friend, Trevelyan, was then not a Labour man or a Socialist in any declared sense. The Progressive Review was definitely opposed to such a general Socialist policy as Keir Hardie was allowed to advocate in one of its early numbers. The term ”New Liberalism” was adopted by Samuel and others as rightly descriptive of its aims. That “New” Liberalism differed from the old in that it envisaged more clearly the need for important economic reforms, aiming to give a positive significance to the “equality” which figured in the democratic triad of liberty, equality, fraternity. “A many-sided policy of thorough economic reform” was the task confronting Parliament as Samuel saw it in 1896. Or, if we turn from “equality” to “liberty,” we may take as its aim the passage quoted by Haldane from T. H. Green in the second number of the Review. “When we measure the progress of a society by its growth in freedom, we measure it by the increasing development and exercise on the whole of those powers of contributing to social good with which we believe the