dent activity in the national mind. This was the condition of England in the eighteenth century. The temporary Wesleyan and Evangelical restorations of belief had not risen to their full height in 1776. The spiritual influence of the Established Church had fallen pretty nearly to its lowest point. Under such circumstances, the only rulers of the mind of the nation were its political rulers. In other words, the only general influences which the State brought to bear upon individuals were expressly calculated to generate narrow, rash, and arbitrary ideas. In transactions which closely concerned their own interests, or which were believed to concern them, the humbler classes were able to discern the propriety and justice of popular resistance. But where, as in the American war, they themselves seemed to be in some sort incorporated in the imperial authority which was disputed, popular resistance struck them as detestable and insolent. Such a sentiment, so far as it was to be met with in the populace, sprung from their ignorance and short-sightedness, just as in a loftier sphere it sprung from the ignorance and short-sightedness of the King. The clergy, in obedience to unfortunate though natural usage, exerted whatever influence they may have had in favour of arbitrary ideas, and the too frequent occasions of national fasting

were improved by angry homilies upon the wickedness of rebellion against constituted authorities.

For once in history we behold an ill-omened alliance between an arbitrary sovereign, fighting the battle of an arbitrary legislature, the aristocracy, the clergy, and the lower populace, all united to enforce oppressive claims against a distant branch of their own community. The sovereign and the humblest ranks of his subjects were actuated by the despotic ideas which are the invariable fruit of ignorance. In the critical election of 1774, for example, the popular verdict in those places where it had the best chance of being genuine was all for the ministers and the King. Westminster would have nothing to do with Burke, and returned two obscure lords of ancient lineage, the candidates of the court. The land-owning aristocracy, with their usual patriotism were thinking of saving themselves a few halfpence in the pound on the land-tax. The clergy inherited repressive tenets from many previous generations; for their Church had learnt, in Burke's gorgeous phrase, "to exalt her mitred front in court and Parliament," only at the expense of her freedom, her nobleness, and her spirituality. No class in the country, except the merchants, set their faces resolutely against the war. Those who

If

did not support the measures of the court stood aside in languor and indifference. It is just possible that this was the mental attitude of a majority of the nation. It was fortunate for them and for us that the yeomen and merchants on the other side of the Atlantic had a more just and energetic appreciation of the crisis. The insurgents, while achieving their own freedom, were indirectly engaged in fighting the battle of the people of the mother country as well. "If England prevails," said Horace Walpole, "English and American liberty is at an end."1 one fell the other would fall with it. Burke, seeing this, "certainly never could and never did wish," as he says of himself, "the colonists to be subdued by arms. He was fully persuaded that if such should be the event, they must be held in that subdued state by a great body of standing forces, and perhaps of foreign forces. He was strongly of opinion that such armies, first victorious over Englishmen, in a conflict for English constitutional rights and privileges, and afterwards habituated (though in America) to keep an English people in a state of abject subjection, would prove fatal in the end to the liberties of England itself."2

1 Letters, vi. 250 (ed. 1857).

2 Appeal from the New to the Old Whiys, Works, i. 504, a.

The way for this more remote peril was being sedulously prepared by a widespread deterioration among popular ideas and a fatal relaxation of the hold which they had previously gained in the public mind. "In order to prove that the Americans have no right to their liberties we are every day endeavouring to subvert the maxims which preserve the whole spirit of our own. To prove that the Americans ought not to be free we are obliged to depreciate the value of freedom itself; and we never seem to gain a paltry advantage over them in debate without attacking some of those principles or deriding some of those feelings for which our ancestors have shed their blood." The material strength of the Government and its moral strength alike would have been reinforced by the defeat of the colonists to such an extent as to have seriously delayed or even jeopardised English progress, and therefore that of Europe too. As it was, public opinion was seriously demoralised by even a temporary infusion of arbitrary ideas into the popular mind.

1

This demoralisation may well be believed to have done something to make the task of repression easystrangely easy, as it appears to us, fifteen years later.

1 Speech on Conciliation with America (March 22, 1775), Works, i. 192, a.

The atrocious legislation of the last five or six years of the eighteenth century was the retribution for the lethargy or approval with which the mass of the English community had watched the measures of 1774. It is impossible to tell even how much this demoralisation of opinion of which I have spoken had to do with our pestilent and short-sighted policy in the revolutionary wars. That policy was dictated by the anger and alarm of the oligarchy. But then the oligarchy knew no better. There had been in the civil war of 1776 an opportunity of teaching them the great lesson which, sooner or later, awaits all oligarchies. But the nation was not ripe. The majority took the wrong side, and were indoctrinated with the wrong set of political maxims. Proving, as Burke said, that the colonists ought not to be free, they depreciated the value of freedom itself. The inoculation of a people with absolutist ideas is an evil process of which the results do not vanish when the external symptoms of inflammation have subsided. The political principles which gained general favour between 1770 and 1780 were the result and the expression of our social state at the time. The success of absolutism in England from 1794 was the result and the measure of the depth to which those political principles had penetrated.