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The fact is that a party which has parted with its convictions may continue to exist for a long time by living on its prejudices. This is the ordinary history of movements, whether political, social or religious, during the period of their decadence, and it is briefly the history of Liberalism during the last fifty years.

The Factory Acts, by their obvious necessity and their equally obvious indefensibility from the Liberal standpoint, knocked the bottom out of Liberalism and made a consistent Liberal philosophy impossible for the future. But only new and growing movements require a philosophy. When a movement has been going long enough to accumulate a fair number of catch-words and a collection of common likes and dislikes, it can make enormous use of these and even win great electoral triumphs on the strength of them long after they have become completely separated from the doctrines from which they originally sprang, and indeed long after these doctrines have become so obsolete as to be universally incredible.