Nineteenth-century European liberals were influenced by classical economics as well as the Lockean tradition. Like their Enlightenment predecessors, they favored limited constitutional government because they believed this structure was less likely to degenerate into tyranny. In general, they advocated a parliamentary government, whose representatives were chosen by some form of majority vote, but whose actions were limited to specific functions defined by a constitution. Generally, these liberals believed that government based on the people would be more conducive to individual freedom than the aristocratic rule favored by conservatives of the time. Typically, however, they had little sympathy for democracy per se; in the wake of the French Revolution, they were fearful of the excesses of mob rule, and only in the latter part of the nineteenth century did they come to advocate even universal male suffrage (

). The ultimate end of government was to secure human freedom; representative government was adopted as a means to this end, not as an end in itself. Liberals were influential in the promotion of free trade (cf. p. 4.11:126). They mounted passionate and eloquent defenses of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly in such writings as John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty, although Mill unfortunately based his arguments on an ethics of social utilitarianism rather than rational self-interest. These thinkers and activists, who became organized in England as the Liberal party in the 1850s, saw themselves as allies of science, peace, and progress, battling the conservative forces of aristocratic privilege, militarism, and the established churches.

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