ABSTRACT
Certainly ‘the political economists’ as a group played an important part in the intellectual, indeed in the emotional, life of nineteenth-century Britain. In 1837 Nassau Senior, professor of political economy at Oxford, a man who had apparently disapproved of excessive hours of labour for children, went on a tour of the factory districts. Political Economy was transformed by the working classes. The pressing desire to find a solution of problems which the abstract science treated as practically insoluble, drew the attention of economists to neglected facts. The exponents of the old school of political economy were still in arrogant possession of much of the ground. In F. D. Maurice’s view the obligations imposed by the facts of a common creation, redemption and humanity must underlie all distinctions of property, rank or political function, if those things were to be justified.
