 A good part of the agenda of the Liberal Party during much of the nineteenth century consisted in reforms that sought to undo limitations that the state placed on the liberties and opportunities of citizens, especially when these forms of state intervention tended to reinforce class privileges. This political culture was exemplified in the repeal of the Corn Laws, opposition to religious persecution, and several electoral reforms. But in the later part of the nineteenth century there emerged a new view about the role of such reforms within the Liberal agenda. Earlier Liberals, such as Herbert Spencer, thought that reform should be limited to the removal of state interference with individual liberty. By contrast, the New Liberals thought that these reforms that extended economic, social, and political liberties had to be supplemented by social and economic reforms in areas of labor, education, and health designed to redress the effects of inequality. These new reforms gave the state positive, and not just negative, responsibilities that sometimes required interference with individual liberties. Because Mill thinks that the state has an important role to play in securing equal opportunity, ensuring a good education that will nurture normative competence, and redressing various market failures and providing various public goods, it makes sense to view Mill as laying much of the intellectual groundwork for the New Liberalism—both in its conception of liberal essentials and in its conception of the proper justification of liberal essentials by appeal to a broadly consequentialist interest in promoting self-realization.