crises of the seventeenth century have contributed nothing directly to the political constitution? Assuredly not; in the first place, they broke through the monarchy of divine right which had grown up with Anglican theocracy; they substituted for it a monarchy which was the result of circumstances and the creature of contract, and which, called into being by a revolution, seems, so to speak, to have been connected from its birth with the political liberties then reasserted, and from which it has never since been separated. Again it was owing to these events that the monarchy took the form of a parliamentary monarchy, that is to say, that in matters relating to the executive, the actual control and the final decision was given to Parliament. After events have all followed from this, but only in process of time and by the aid of an economic and social transformation which was the special achievement of the eighteenth century. For example, was this parliamentary monarchy to be aristocratic or democratic? A Parliament can be either. Which class was to enjoy the largest share of power? What share or what compensations were to be reserved to the less favoured classes? not merely the final decision but also the initiative to lie with Parliament? in other words, was Parliament to be a mere committee of control, or was it destined to become a governing body? In the latter case, by what steps was it to attain its object? How was it possible to reconcile the principle of national representation, the prerogatives of the Crown, the requisite promptness, secrecy, and continuity necessary for the transaction of public affairs, the dignity and independence of statesmen,

Was

and the responsibility of ministers to Parliament? All these problems of first-rate importance still left unsolved after 1688 were only worked out by a gradual process during the course of the eighteenth century.

Two words suffice to contrast the revolutions of the seventeenth century with the revolution which, beginning about 1760, ended in 1832. The first were purely political, the second was both political and social. The peculiarity of a social revolution lies in the fact that it is preceded, developed and brought about by a change in the relative proportions of the wealth and prestige enjoyed by the various classes of the community and by the various members of each class. The task of such a revolution is to effect a species of proportionate adjustment of power or political influence and to bring them into correspondence with the altered distribution of economic forces and moral claims. The two revolutions of the seventeenth century had nothing of the sort to accomplish. They proceeded on complaints urged by the whole nation against the oppressive encroachments of the Crown; their object was to maintain intact the ancient provisions of the Constitution, to protect them against untoward innovations, to discover and set up again the buried landmarks of authority and to see that that authority was guaranteed in the future. In a certain sense and in their original impulse they only aimed at restoring the ancient law of the land. They met with no opposition except from the high-handed duplicity of princes; and the only change which they had to bring about was that of one dynasty for another. The revolution in its radical sense was not then needed

E.C.

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and did not in fact take place. We may say with sufficient accuracy that its first beginnings appeared only after the Restoration, that it grew and ripened during the first half of the seventeenth century, that it burst forth after 1760 in the shape of an agrarian revolution which can be compared to nothing but that "transfer of property "1 on a gigantic scale in the opposite direction which was to take place thirty years later in France. The revolution in England was consummated by a twenty years' crusade against the revolution in France, and it ended by concentrating all political power in the hands of a singularly exclusive rural caste, and that at a moment when a powerful industrial class, after a rapid growth of less than half a century, had become the dominant economic factor. Throughout a whole period we find what almost amounts to two distinct nations living side by side within the same kingdom and yet holding distinct economic theories and enjoying almost distinct civil rights, the one dispensing government and law, the other, so to speak, outside the legal pale. The day, however, came at last when the urban and manufacturing classes, who had gained the ground which their rivals had lost, asserted their claim to a share of power and infused a fresh spirit into the national policy.

Taine, Origines de la France Contemporaine.

II

COLONIZATION, COMMERCE, AND INDUSTRY BEFORE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

In order to view these changes comprehensively and distinguish their real causes, we must start farther back in our subject, with English society under the Tudors, at the moment when it was settling down almost into its modern shape; we must make a thorough examination of its structure, and trace the variations of shape and fashion which successive events impressed upon it down to the beginning of the eighteenth century. The divisions of the various classes, the spirit which animates them, their mutual relations, the means of passing from one to another, the amount of wealth, well-being, and liberty enjoyed by each respectively, their privileges and their spheres in the State, their positions in reference to the Crown and to Parliament, all these deserve at any rate a passing notice.

The historian never escapes completely from the impressions of the present; it is in vain that he tries to dispel them; he feels their influence continually, and, in spite of his most conscientious efforts, they modify his conceptions of the past. At the mere name of

England we picture to ourselves a country which is the centre of a mighty colonial system, her possessions scattered here and there in the old world and the new, her fleets without number, her ports in every land; we see a great metropolis surpassing all Scotland and soon to rival all Ireland in the numbers of its population; twenty other great towns each containing more than 100,000 souls; forty-two others very little inferior: we imagine whole districts where houses multiply till they touch and crowd upon each other, where pure air never enters and no green thing can grow; factories in thousands mingling their smoke; a pallid population of toilers, crowded almost shoulder to shoulder over leagues of country, their numbers swollen at nightfall with the dusky phantoms cast up by the dark city underground; vast areas densely packed with a haggard, toiling population. We cannot rid ourselves of these powerful impressions when we attempt to call up the England of another age. We cannot realize void and silence in the very place where that vast workshop, that busy mart, that warehouse and dock for all the world swarms today with din and movement.

The original of this picture is, however, of recent date; the England of the Tudors was the very reverse of the England of our day. The English were still at the beginning of the seventeenth century as much, if not more than any other nation of civilized Europe, a stationary agricultural and pastoral community, with a tendency even to become more pastoral than agricultural. The nation which was destined to show such eagerness for emigration, such skill in founding colonies upon un