The people unrepresented. ment was supreme, but it had ceased to represent the people. The meanest motives told upon it, and purchase had become more and more the means of entering it. Walpole, prime minister from 1721 to 1742, organized corruption into a system; and the Duke of Newcastle, prime minister from 1754 to 1761, based, without concealment, his power upon bribery and borough-jobbing. These were Whig administrations. Under George III, the Tories did no better, £25,000 being spent, sometimes, in a single day to influence votes. The moral tone of public life was profoundly lowered: the social condition of the people, moreover, deprived of the suffrage, and influenced by the demoralizing example set by those high in station, sank rapidly toward the shameful. Was the nation unconscious of the disgrace which had come upon it; and were no voices raised for a reform of abuses? By no means. The question exciting most interest about the year 1750 was the extreme corruption of Parliament, its subjection to the executive, and the danger of its becoming the oppressor, not the representative, of the people. Many began to think the country had gained little by exchanging an arbitrary King for a Parliament corrupt and tyrannical.2 In a few years we find Burke exclaiming, "The value, spirit, and essence of a House of Commons consists in its being the express image of the feelings of the nation." Still more emphatically another declared: "This House is not a representative of the people of Great Britain. It is the representative of nomination-boroughs, of ruined 1 D. B. Eaton: Journal of Social Science, V, 1.. 2 Lecky: XVIIIth Century, II, p. 470. and exterminated towns, of noble families, of wealthy individuals, of foreign potentates," and he denounced the abuses.1 Such, too, were the sentiments of the great Earl of Chatham. Case of Mass-meetings. The case of Wilkes, first heard of in 1761, produced the deepest popular agitation. Wilkes, a man of ability, and a strong champion of freedom, though unfortunately his character was not good, had been legally chosen to Parliament in London. Parliament, assuming an authority which it had never possessed, twice declared Wilkes incapable, action which the people on their part met with energetic remonstrance, ending twice with a re-election of their rejected favorite. Great radical associations were formed. With the disturbances of this time. began the influence of public meetings on politics. In towns masses gathered, as in the case of the Middlesex electors; in the counties, too, were great assemblies, as in the case of the Yorkshire free-holders; and in these vast meetings it became a familiar cry that the House of Commons did not represent the people. The people at the same period discovered still another channel by which they could make their power felt. For the first time the debates in Parliament were made public. Secrecy being now destroyed, a salutary feeling of responsibility was forced upon members, who found themselves called sharply to account before a tribunal for which until now they had cared but little. The first great newspapers, moreover, were coming into existence; and these forthwith, as organs of public opinion, began a course of criticism upon public men, exasper 1 J. R. Green: History of the English People, IV, p. 205, etc. ating, often undiscriminating, and yet on the whole most beneficent. As the second half of the eighteenth century proceeded, a powerful party began to manifest itself, determined that Anglo-Saxon liberty should not be destroyed without a struggle. The party comprised a portion of those not disfranchised, a few indeed of the great nobles: the mass of its members, however, were the unrepresented millions, the multitude so long subjected to the encroachments of the rich and great, until now they were quite thrust out of their rights. It was a party numerous, able, and quite ready to do valiant battle. Dangers to Nevertheless, the danger to freedom was appalling. The influence of foreign opinion and example were almost wholly for despotism. In the counfreedom. tries of Europe, what liberties had ever existed in the past were now completely wrecked. Popular freedom in Spain, Italy, and France had long ago disappeared. More recently most of the freedom of the towns of Flanders, Germany, and along the Baltic had been destroyed or transmuted into forms thoroughly inefficient: the Swiss cantons lay under the dominion of a narrow oligarchy.1 In the Old World, it was only the Liberals of England who remembered and were disposed to strive for popular freedom. Disfranchised as they were, opposed at home by the rich, the learned, the wellborn, entrenched in places of power and headed by a King of despotic disposition, whose capacity for mischief was increased by the circumstance that he was morally respectable and possessed some force of character, who will say that the outlook was not most 1 Lecky: XVIIIth Century, III, p. 242. critical? So thought, at any rate, many a lover of liberty, and some made preparations to expatriate themselves, as was done by the founders of New England when Laud and Strafford seemed likely to carry through their policy of Thorough. How Anglo-Saxon freedom in this crisis was saved to England and to the world is a very memorable story. CHAPTER XIII. THE COMING ON OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 1700-1776. THE English colonies on the Atlantic seaboard of America, from feeble beginnings, had become in a Condition of the Thirteen Colonies in the first half of the eigh. teenth century. century and a half communities populous and full of resources; but holding little communication with each other, and varying much in spirit and polity. In Massachusetts, which had absorbed Plymouth, and which also comprised Maine, thus becoming by far the most important colony of the North, the people were distributed among two hundred towns, each governing itself in its town-meeting, which reproduced with curious accuracy the moot-government of the primitive Teutonic community. As each Teutonic tun sent representatives to the higher moot, so each Massachusetts town sent a representative to a central assembly at Boston. There the deputies met a Crown-appointed governor, and also a council, in constituting which both assembly and governor had a voice. After the same general plan were ordered the remaining New England colonies. The oligarchic features of the earlier years had quite disappeared; not only church-members, but each reputable freeman had a vote; and, except for some restraint |