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. 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, Case of though unfortunately his character was not Wilkes. 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 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 imposed by the Sovereign, the polity was thoroughly democratic, a resuscitation of forms most ancient. Virginia, on the other hand, by far the most important colony of the South, resembled in her constitution contemporary England. A class of great planters, forming a landed gentry, possessed the territory and also all political power; while a numerous body below them was without estates and also without voice in the political management. While here and there divisions could be made out corresponding to the contemporary English parishes, like them called parishes and each governed by its vestry, the real unit of political life was the county, administered by its Court of Quarter Sessions, closely similar to the institution of the same name, which, in the mothercountry, had replaced, except for elective purposes, the shire-moot. In one respect, Virginia differed widely from the mother-country,— full half her population were negro slaves. For a central government there was a governor, a council, and a representative assembly. After the same general plan as that of Virginia were ordered the other Southern colonies. In the middle colonies, both society and institutions were far from homogeneous. In New York, to the original Dutch, the English had been added, and to these again a German element; the young city at the mouth of the Hudson was made up of waifs of all nations. On portions of the territory stood towns scarcely differing from those of New England; on other portions, the great manors of the patroons; on still others, some simple patriarchal form of community. In Pennsylvania and Maryland, the state was distinctly feudal, the territory having been given to |