ABSTRACT
The Edinburgh Review became the intellectual house-journal of the Whig party; it championed both the new political economy and liberal causes such as the abolition of slavery and law reform. William Pitt offered more temperate invocation of the 'ample testimony' of the truth of the 'most celebrated writers upon political economy'. Pitt knew and admired Adam Smith; he derived great intellectual stimulus during his unprecedentedly brief youth from reading Wealth of Nations in the company of his cousin and Cabinet colleague, William Grenville. Smith's commitment to laissez-faire was more guarded than was that of heedless or dogma-driven 'privatisers' or 'neo-liberals' in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. By 1820 there was immensely strong intellectual underpinning for a programme of radical reform of the Poor Laws on laissez-faire lines. Pitt proposed poor law reform which would create 'Schools of Industry', give additional relief to large families and, more generally, advance the cause of self-help via subscriptions to Friendly Societies.
