blies. Each freeman indeed could not come himself to the deliberations; but each freeman had a voice in determining who should stand in his place and speak his will, from each shire the two discreet knights, from each borough the delegated burgess. In the Parliament of the eighteenth century this condition of things did not exist. It had come about that a portion of the seats of the House of Power of the Commons were practically owned by great nobles, who filled them with subservient wealth. creatures. The nobles sat at the same time in the House of Lords. To their direct power as peers, therefore, was added a vast, indirect power, obtained through their influence in the lower House, a power so great that it approached the proportions of an oligarchy.

men of

nobles and

Still another element in the nation had come to wield a portentous influence. The growth of a great commercial class was undoubtedly on the whole a good, but it was not a good unmixed with evil. Merchants and manufacturers became possessed of wealth: the colonies and establishments of the large trading companies in the West and in the Orient offered opportunities to the bold and rapacious which were eagerly embraced. Men grew rich at home, in the East and West Indies, in America. Not satisfied with riches, they desired also power. By the score they bought their way into the House of Commons, showing no scruple about employing corruption; as on the other hand the degenerate constituencies had no scruple about accepting the bribes that were offered. By the side of the vast power the nobles had seized, a dangerous plutocracy had placed it

self. The bearing upon the fortunes of Anglo-Saxon freedom, of the condition of things which had come to pass in the middle of the eighteenth century, is so important as to require careful consideration.

CHAPTER XII.

ERA OF PARLIAMENTARY CORRUPTION.

George I, 1714. George II, 1727. George III, 1760.

de

Equal responsibility of

Whigs and

Tories for

Parliamen

tary corrup

tion.

IN the middle of the eighteenth century no one thought of questioning the principles of the Revolution of 1688. The doctrine of divine right had fallen out of favor. Parliament was recognized as the supreme power in the State. We have to consider now the generacy of Parliament, the extent to which it had ceased to represent the nation and fallen a prey to corruption. At an earlier time, when the Sovereigns had been more powerful, there had been little corruption: it was much cheaper to coerce or intimidate a knave than to buy him. For a very different reason, there is little direct buying of votes in our own time. The nation now holds Parliament strictly accountable to itself: everything is thoroughly ventilated in the newspapers: public opinion holds all in fear. But between the time when the Kings influenced Parliament, and the time when public opinion began to make itself felt, there was an interval during which corruption was scarcely opposed. This interval extended from 1688 until the close of the war with America, in 1783. The great

centuries of the Christian era a strong Teutonic infusion, and at one time had possessed, as we have seen, institutions characterized to some extent by the same Teutonic freedom which had gone with the AngloSaxons to the island of Britain.1 In Germany and Scandinavia the stock was more purely Teutonic, and in those lands the polity of the forefathers had long endured. Russia, though Slavic, was at any rate Aryan, and her people possessed in the mir a village community as marked in its independence as the tuns and burhs of the Anglo-Saxons. In all these countries, however, the traces of popular freedom had long been effaced. The old national assemblies in France, Spain, and Italy had nearly or quite disappeared. The perishing of liberty under the blight of despots had been in Germany and the northern lands even more complete; in Russia, the local self-government had proved utterly sterile as regards resources for coping with the greed of tyrants. Only in Switzerland there smouldered in valleys almost inaccessible the embers of freedom, by the great world unnoticed and indeed unknown. Holland, to be sure, had wrenched itself from the grasp of Spain, but had fallen apparently into the hands of an oligarchy. Throughout Europe the right of the great to make laws and levy taxes was undisputed; thrones were guarded by regular armies; the prompt penalties for any criticism of the rulers were the dungeon and the scaffold. Again and again the same calamity had been imminent over England. But for Langton and the Barons, in 1215, what might not John have done? Had factious nobles pressed less

1 p. 62.

heavily upon the Lancastrians, could the noble constitutional programme described by Fortescue ever have become real? Had the Tudors dared a little more, or had the one man Strafford not been taken from the right hand of Charles I, where could freedom have harbored? These crises, as we have seen, had all been safely passed. With the promulgation of the Bill of Rights, the crisis of 1688 was also safely passed.

Revolution of 1688.

The deposition of James II stands in history under the name of a revolution: it, however, was a strictly defensive movement, having on its side prescription and legitimacy.1 The monarchy as limited in the thirteenth century had come down to the seventeenth century. Parliament had behind it a past of four hundred years. The constitution was not formulated, but its principles, scattered throughout time-honored statutes, were engraven on the hearts of Englishmen. No one of its principles was based upon precedents more ancient or more frequent, than that Kings reigned by a right in no respect differing from that by which knights-ofthe-shire exercised authority in behalf of their constituents.2 The Bill of Rights simply affirmed this principle. Not a single new right was given to the people; the whole body of English law was changed; all was conducted in obedience to the ancient formalities. The Revolution of 1688 decided that the popular element in the English polity, of such ancient derivation, so often brought very low and yet never extinguished, should once more survive. In 1688, the old land in this struggle against

1 Macaulay: History of England, I, p. 514, etc. 2 Ibid., p. 216.

un