upon them to send two inhabitants, citizens, or burgesses, as representatives, and after that year they received regularly a summons to Parliament. The year 1295 is therefore a date of capital importance. The beginning of the fourteenth century found Parliament consisting of all the essentials of a truly national assembly, and representing even more completely than at the present day (for certain elements have been lost by exclusion or disuse) the various components of the English nation.

How different this from the state of things in France where, during the greater part of the middle ages, both the rural districts and the parochial clergy were practically unrepresented. The difference however will appear still greater if we observe in what manner the elements enumerated above separated from each other, grouped themselves together, and fell into their places within the Parliament itself. At the outset the burgesses held their sittings apart; on the other hand the knights of the shire joined themselves to the barons, a natural state of things when both represented feudal and rural interests. The clergy voted their subsidy apart. We find this threefold division in 1295 and again in 1296, in 1305 and in 1308; and we find it also in the French States General at the same period. Before long, however, another arrangement prevailed. The bonds of sympathy were strongest on the one hand between the barons and the prelates accustomed for two centuries to deliberate together, and on the other between the knights and the burgesses, both the creatures of election, chosen or proclaimed simultaneously at the

county court, where they had often sat side by side. under the presidency of the justices in eyre. A method of distribution in agreement with these tendencies began more and more to prevail. After 1341 the heads of the clergy (save on certain rare occasions) maintained their union with the lay nobles and formed with them the House of Lords, and from the same date the two other classes were grouped together by a corresponding process. The knights and the burgesses formed the House of Commons and, except in a few rare cases, none of which occur after the fourteenth century, were never afterwards separated. As for the last element, the parochial clergy, they too formed part of the House of Commons; but instances of their attendance soon become infrequent and finally cease altogether. Their poverty and the cares of their ministry compelled their absence; they also felt themselves more at home in their own special assemblies, the convocations of York and Canterbury, which they attended as a sort of Lower House upon the summons of their primates. The custom grew up accordingly for the Church's share in the subsidy to be voted in Convocation, not in Parliament. Thus from the middle of the fourteenth century the House of Commons was deserted by the clergy, and the secular representatives of the counties and boroughs were left to themselves and masters of the situation. The heads of the clergy were still powerful in the House of Lords, where abbots and priors were twice or thrice as numerous as bishops, and they viewed with indifference the disappearance of the plain parish priest from the House of Commons, the future greatness and supremacy

of which they could not as yet foresee. We thus find the English Parliament complete in all its component parts in 1295, and organized and grouped fifty years later in accordance with three principles which mark a radical difference between it and the French States General. These three principles are :—

I. The division of Parliament into two Houses, a division which crossed and partly obliterated the lines of demarkation between the classes, while in France, on the contrary, those lines were emphasized by the fact that each of the three orders formed a separate House. In England no order sat alone; in each House two orders sat together, an arrangement which precluded the dominance of any narrow spirit of class.

II. The coming together in the English Lower House of the urban element and a rural element of ancient standing, wide influence, and exceptional energy which had belonged originally to the baronage. It was chiefly the want of such an association as this which caused the weakness of the French "third estate," a purely urban body made up of successful civilians, borough magistrates or lawyers, men unconnected with any interest in land, and strangers to the profession of arms. Failing the existence of an agricultural middle class, that third estate never succeeded in bridging the gulf which divided it from the noblesse, it remained shut up in its isolation, swayed alternately by timidity and violence, the common vices of every new class which has neither allies nor traditions to support it.

III. The predominantly lay character of this supreme body. One branch of it contained no ecclesiastical

representatives at all; in the other branch these representatives were mingled with the secular element, they sat only by virtue of a secular title, the baronial fief appurtenant to bishoprics and to certain abbeys, and were thus imbued to a very high degree with national feeling and the spirit of a civil community.

V

THE TUDORS. THE EXTINCTION OF THE FEUDAL NOBILITY-THE FALL OF THE ROMISH CHURCH.

MODERN ENGLAND

THUS Parliament has existed in its present form since the middle of the fourteenth century. A second stage in the political evolution of England began with the Lancastrian, and was completed with the Tudor period. The composition of the various classes of society, their places in the social scale, and their relative importance in the State, underwent at that time a profound change. A fresh system of stratification, so to speak, was established which was to remain undisturbed by all subsequent shocks, and which formed the foundation upon which modern England was built up. Two facts above

all gave its final form to the character of political society, and, in spite of two revolutions, made their influence felt as far down as the vast industrial and rural transformation which was accomplished in England in the eighteenth century: these were, the