new duties. Even in the "Great Charter" the notion of new enactments was secondary: it was a great mixture of old and new; it was a sort of compact defining what was doubtful in floating custom, and was re-enacted over and over again, as boundaries are perambulated once a year and rights and claims tending to desuetude thereby made patent and cleared of new obstructions. In truth, such great "charters" were rather treaties between different orders and factions, confirming ancient rights or what claimed to be such, than laws in our ordinary sense. They were the "deeds of arrangement" of mediæval society, affirmed and reaffirmed from time to time; and the principal controversy was of course between the king and [the] nation, the king trying to see how far the nation would let him go, and the nation murmuring and recalcitrating and seeing how many acts of [the] administration they could prevent and how many of its claims they could resist.

Sir James Mackintosh says that Magna Charta "converted the right of taxation into the shield of liberty"; but it did nothing of the sort. The liberty existed before, and the right to be taxed was an efflorescence and instance of it, not a substratum or a cause. The necessity of consulting the great council of the realm before taxation, the principle that the declaration of grievances by the Parliament was to precede the grant of supplies to the sovereign, are but conspicuous instances of the primitive doctrine. of the ante-Tudor period that the king must consult the "great council" of the realm before he did anything, since he always wanted help. The right of selftaxation was justly inserted in the "great treaty," but it would have been a dead letter save for the armed force and aristocratic organization which compelled the king to make a treaty: it was a result, not a basis; an example, not a cause.

The civil wars of many years killed out the old councils (if I might so say); that is, destroyed three

parts of the greater nobility who were its most potent members, tired the small nobility and the gentry, and overthrew the aristocratic organization on which all previous effectual resistance to the sovereign had been based.

The second period of the British Constitution begins with the accession of the House of Tudor, and goes down to 1688; it is in substance the history of the growth, development, and gradually acquired supremacy of the new "great council." I have no room and no occasion to narrate again the familiar history of the many steps by which the slavish Parliament of Henry VIII. grew into the murmuring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth, the mutinous Parliament of James I., and the rebellious Parliament of Charles I.; the steps were many, but the energy was one, the growth of the English middle class (using that word in its most inclusive sense) and its animation under the influence of Protestantism. No one, I think, can doubt that Lord Macaulay is right in saying that political causes would not alone have then provoked such a resistance to the sovereign, unless propelled by religious theory. Of course the English people went to and fro from Catholicism to Protestantism, and from Protestantism to Catholicism (not to mention that the Protestantism was of several shades and sects), just as the first Tudor kings and queens wished; but that was in the pre-Puritan era: the mass of Englishmen were in an undecided state, just as Hooper tells us his father was,-"not believing in Protestantism, yet not disinclined to it." Gradually, however, a strong Evangelic spirit (as we should now speak) and a still stronger anti-Papal spirit entered into the middle sort of Englishmen, and added to that force, fiber, and substance which they have never wanted, an ideal warmth and fervor which they have almost always wanted; hence the saying that Cromwell founded the English Constitution. Of course, in seeming, Cromwell's work died with him; his dynasty

was rejected, his republic çast aside: but the spirit which culminated in him never sank again, never ceased to be a potent-though often a latent and volcanic-force in the country. Charles II. said that he would never go again on his travels for anything or anybody; and he well knew that though the men whom he met at Worcester might be dead, still the spirit which warmed them was alive and young in others.

But the Cromwellian republic and the strict Puritan creed were utterly hateful to most Englishmen : they were, if I may venture on saying so, like the "Rouge" element in France and elsewhere, the sole revolutionary force in the entire state, and were hated as such. That force could do little of itself,indeed, its bare appearance tended to frighten and alienate the moderate and dull as well as the refined and reasoning classes; alone, it was impotent against the solid clay of the English apathetic nature: but give this fiery element a body of decent-looking earth, give it an excuse for breaking out on an occasion when the decent, the cultivated, and [the] aristocratic classes could join with it, and they could conquer by means of it and it could be disguised in their covering.

Such an excuse was found in 1688. James II., by incredible and pertinacious folly, irritated not only the classes which had fought against his father, but also those who had fought for his father; he offended the Anglican classes as well as the Puritan classes, all the Whig nobles and half the Tory nobles as well as the Dissenting bourgeois: the rule of Parliament was established by the concurrence of the usual supporters of royalty with the usual opponents of it. But the result was long weak. Our Revolution has been called the minimum of a revolution, because in law at least it only changed the dynasty; but exactly on that account it was the greatest shock to the common multitude, who see the dynasty but see nothing

else. The support of the main aristocracy held together, the bulk of the deferential classes, but it held them together imperfectly, uneasily, and unwillingly; huge masses of crude prejudice swayed hither and thither for many years. If an able Stuart had with credible sincerity professed Protestantism, probably he might have overturned the House of Hanover. So strong was inbred reverence for hereditary right, that until the accession of George III. the English government was always subject to the unceasing attrition of a competitive sovereign.

This was the result of what I insist on tediously, but what is most necessary to insist on, for it is a cardinal particular in the whole topic: many of the English people—the higher and more educated por-tion - had come to comprehend the nature of constitutional government, but the mass did not comprehend it; they looked to the sovereign as the government, and to the sovereign only. These were carried forward by the magic of the aristocracy, and principally by the influence of the great Whig families with their adjuncts; without that aid, reason or liberty would never have held them.

Though the rule of Parliament was definitely established in 1688, yet the mode of exercising that rule has since changed. At first Parliament did not know how to exercise it: the organization of parties and the appointment of Cabinets by parties grew up in the manner Macaulay has described so well. Up to the latest period the sovereign was supposed, to a most mischievous extent, to interfere in the choice of the persons to be ministers. When George III. finally became insane, in 1810, every one believed that George IV., on assuming power as Prince Regent, would turn out Mr. Perceval's Government and empower Lord Grey or Lord Grenville, the Whig leaders, to form another. The Tory ministry was carrying on a successful war-a war of existence - against Napoleon; but in the people's mind, the necessity at such an

occasion for an unchanged Government did not outweigh the fancy that George IV. was a Whig. And a Whig, it is true, he had been before the French Revolution, when he lived an indescribable life in St. James's Street with Mr. Fox: but Lord Grey and Lord Grenville were rigid men, and had no immoral sort of influence; what liberalism of opinion the Regent ever had was frightened out of him (as of other people) by the Reign of Terror,―he felt, according to the saying of another monarch, that "he lived by being a royalist." It soon appeared that he was most anxious to retain Mr. Perceval, and that he was most eager to quarrel with the Whig lords: as we all know, he kept the ministry whom he found in office; but that it should have been thought he could then change them is a significant example how exceedingly modern our notions of the despotic action of Parliament in fact are.

By the steps of the struggle thus rudely mentioned (and by others which I have no room to speak of, nor need I), the change which in the Greek cities was effected both in appearance and in fact, has been effected in England, though in reality only and not in outside. Here too the appendages of a monarchy have been converted into the essence of a republic; only here, because of a more numerous heterogeneous political population, it is needful to keep the ancient show while we secretly interpolate the new reality.

This long and curious history has left its trace on almost every part of our present political condition: its effects lie at the root of many of our most important controversies; and because these effects are not rightly perceived, many of these controversies are misconceived.

One of the most curious peculiarities of the English people is its dislike of the executive government. We are not in this respect un vrai peuple moderne, like the Americans. The Americans conceive of their executive as one of their appointed agents; when it