Laud. Some episodes in the history of Puritanism in America are at least as revolting as any of the crimes which interested polemists are accustomed to lay at the door of Catholicism or Anglicanism in England. But the principle of a system continues to work apart from temporary distortions and perversions. The Puritans might forget for a time that they owed their very existence to the vindication of the right of free judgment. Still, the old tradition of throwing off the episcopal yoke survived through all this to colour their lives and opinions. Their disrespect for human authority in theology led by a natural association of ideas to a no less warm disapproval of arbitrary authority in the political sphere. This connexion was inevitable.

The revolutionary power latent in the Protestant doctrine was shown in the daring and unparalleled revolt of the Dutch against Philip II. in the sixteenth century. If we take into account the thoroughness with which the notion of respect for temporal authority had incorporated itself with the European life of that time, if we realize fully the awful divinity which then did hedge a king, we shall be able to appreciate the forces inherent in a theory which could animate a people,-after long and horrible sufferings, it is truc,-with moral

daring enough to scatter these venerated traditions to the winds.

In England in the seventeenth century, the social conditions were not ripe for the general movement to which the Puritan sentiment, thus expanded and transformed, seemed clearly to point. The preparation of public opinion was incomplete. The intellectual basis of anti-aristocratic ideas had not yet been sufficiently strongly laid. The policy which had suppressed the House of Lords was prematurely enlightened. There had been no Eighteenth Century, and the critical doctrine was still in its initial phase. It was impossible permanently to revolutionize an old society with deep and twisted roots, by such imperfectly tempered weapons as Puritanism was able to furnish out of its armoury. Cromwell's native ascendancy of character compensated for this imperfection while he remained to guide the course of affairs. At his death the current of social conditions, which had only been dammed up, and not finally diverted into new channels, flowed on in its old bed with only a slightly accelerated rapidity. In the colonies the case was widely different. The Puritan idea, alike in its own theological order and in the political order where it had struck a firm root, was checked by no encounter with an old social state too

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deeply laid to be speedily modified. The colonies offered an open field for its free spread and unrestrained development. Feudalism had never been transplanted, for hereditary privilege and the multiform ideas which spring from the legal recognition of primogeniture,1 were too exclusively the products of European development to bear removal into a strange and keener air. There was no Church in alliance with a territorial aristocracy, ready to purchase the patronage of the State by the degrading advocacy of absolutist principles, eager by the dissemination of despotic doctrine to earn deaneries and bishoprics. Thus the lapse of a century and a half gave time for the spirit of independence to grow ineradicably into the national character. The American Rebellion was the third and last illustration of the regenerative force of Protestantism. The Dutch Revolt and the English Civil War had been more religious than political. The third was political in form and in substance, but its impulses and momentum came from the distant struggle of old days for the right of private judgment. For the third and last time the wave of Protestantism swept forward and submerged a political system."

The Cavalier colony of Virginia was in this point an exception. 2 "All Protestantism, even the most cold and passive, is a sort of

The forms and ceremonial of government in an old country have clustering round them innumerable associations which cannot be suddenly touched without subverting order and dissolving society. In the colonies, the special forms of government were no more than an external accident. Those powerful associations which lie half-concealed about the roots and foundations of national character were in the minds of the colonists rather inclined in the direction of resistance than of reverence. This was their inherited predisposition. Their ancestors had resisted the arbitrary designs of a monarch in the seventeenth century, and had only partially succeeded, because the

dissent. But the religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principle of resistance; it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion. This religion, under a variety of denominations agreeing in nothing but in the communion of the spirit of liberty, is predominant in most of the northern provinces; where the Church of England, notwithstanding its legal rights, is in reality no more than a sort of private sect, not comprising, most probably, the tenth of the people. The colonists left England when this spirit was high, and in the emigrants was highest of all; and even that stream of foreigners which has been constantly flowing into these colonies has, for the greatest part, been composed of dissenters from the establishments of their several countries, and have brought with them a temper and character far from alien to that of the people with whom they mixed."-Speech on Conciliation with America, Works, i. 187, b. Cf. also Comte's Positive Philosophy (English Translation), ii. 341.

social conditions of old establishment were much too strong for them. In the eighteenth century arbitrary pretensions had sprung up in the Imperial Parliament. The colonists were as resolute in resisting the unconstitutional claims of Lord North's majority as their forefathers had been in withstanding the claims of Charles I. The great American rebellion of the eighteenth century was the sequel of the great English rebellion of the seventeenth century. Fortunately, in America no barrier of time-honoured loyalty, of timorous adherence to ideas which had become too narrow to meet the facts, obstructed the prosperous course of the revolution. With admirable promptitude, as soon as ever the struggle became unmistakeable and unavoidable, the colonists at the very outset took up the ground which they finally maintained in triumph. There never was a revolution on the whole-and I do not forget the winter of 1779-80-so little stayed and fretted by doubters and Laodiceans, by quaking hair-splitters and moon-struck refiners. The leaders of the rebellion were able to take this decisive and unhesitating stand, without pausing in prolonged and unprofitable debate, as a consequence of that fermentation of free ideas which had been in process among them ever since the birth of the colonies. As