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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The History of England, by A. F. Pollard
+
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+Title: The History of England
+       A Study in Political Evolution
+
+Author: A. F. Pollard
+
+Release Date: August, 2004 [EBook #6358]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[This file was first posted on December 1, 2002]
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+Edition: 10
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Anne Soulard, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND
+A STUDY IN POLITICAL EVOLUTION
+
+BY A. F. POLLARD, M.A., LITT.D.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+CHAP.
+   I THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND, 55 B.C.-A.D. 1066
+  II THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND, 1066-1272
+ III EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 1272-1485
+  IV THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM, 1485-1603
+   V THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT, 1603-1815
+  VI THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND, 1603-1815
+ VII THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
+VIII A CENTURY OF EMPIRE, 1815-1911
+  IX ENGLISH DEMOCRACY
+
+CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+INDEX
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND
+
+55 B.C.--A.D. 1066
+
+
+"Ah, well," an American visitor is said to have soliloquized on the
+site of the battle of Hastings, "it is but a little island, and it has
+often been conquered." We have in these few pages to trace the
+evolution of a great empire, which has often conquered others, out of
+the little island which was often conquered itself. The mere incidents
+of this growth, which satisfied the childlike curiosity of earlier
+generations, hardly appeal to a public which is learning to look upon
+historical narrative not as a simple story, but as an interpretation of
+human development, and upon historical fact as the complex resultant of
+character and conditions; and introspective readers will look less for
+a list of facts and dates marking the milestones on this national march
+than for suggestions to explain the formation of the army, the spirit
+of its leaders and its men, the progress made, and the obstacles
+overcome. No solution of the problems presented by history will be
+complete until the knowledge of man is perfect; but we cannot approach
+the threshold of understanding without realizing that our national
+achievement has been the outcome of singular powers of assimilation, of
+adaptation to changing circumstances, and of elasticity of system.
+Change has been, and is, the breath of our existence and the condition
+of our growth.
+
+Change began with the Creation, and ages of momentous development are
+shrouded from our eyes. The land and the people are the two foundations
+of English history; but before history began, the land had received the
+insular configuration which has largely determined its fortune; and the
+various peoples, who were to mould and be moulded by the land, had
+differentiated from the other races of the world. Several of these
+peoples had occupied the land before its conquest by the Anglo-Saxons,
+some before it was even Britain. Whether neolithic man superseded
+palaeolithic man in these islands by invasion or by domestic evolution,
+we do not know; but centuries before the Christian era the Britons
+overran the country and superimposed themselves upon its swarthy, squat
+inhabitants. They mounted comparatively high in the scale of
+civilization; they tilled the soil, worked mines, cultivated various
+forms of art, and even built towns. But their loose tribal organization
+left them at the mercy of the Romans; and though Julius Caesar's two
+raids in 55 B.C. and 54 B.C. left no permanent results, the conquest
+was soon completed when the Romans came in earnest in A.D. 43.
+
+The extent to which the Romans during the three and a half centuries of
+their rule in Britain civilized its inhabitants is a matter of doubtful
+inference. The remains of Roman roads, Roman walls, and Roman villas
+still bear witness to their material activity; and an occupation of the
+land by Roman troops and Roman officials, spread over three hundred and
+fifty years, must have impressed upon the upper classes of the Britons
+at least some acquaintance with the language, religion, administration,
+and social and economic arrangements of the conquerors. But, on the
+whole, the evidence points rather to military occupation than to
+colonization; and the Roman province resembled more nearly a German
+than a British colony of to-day. Rome had then no surplus population
+with which to fill new territory; the only emigrants were the soldiers,
+the officials, and a few traders or prospectors; and of these most were
+partially Romanized provincials from other parts of the empire, for a
+Roman soldier of the third century A.D. was not generally a Roman or
+even an Italian. The imperial government, moreover, considered the
+interests of Britain not in themselves but only as subordinate to the
+empire, which any sort of distinctive national organization would have
+threatened. This distinguishes Roman rule in Britain from British rule
+in India; and if the army in Britain gradually grew more British, it
+was due to the weakness and not to the policy of the imperial
+government. There was no attempt to form a British constitution, or
+weld British tribes into a nation; for Rome brought to birth no
+daughter states, lest she should dismember her all-embracing unity. So
+the nascent nations warred within and rent her; and when, enfeebled and
+distracted by the struggle, she relaxed her hold on Britain, she left
+it more cultivated, perhaps, but more enervated and hardly stronger or
+more united than before.
+
+Hardier peoples were already hovering over the prey. The Romans had
+themselves established a "count of the Saxon shore" to defend the
+eastern coasts of Britain against the pirates of the German Ocean; and
+it was not long after its revolt from Rome in 410, that the Angles and
+Saxons and Jutes discovered a chance to meddle in Britain, torn as it
+was by domestic anarchy, and threatened with inroads by the Picts and
+Scots in the north. Neither this temptation nor the alleged invitation
+from the British chief Vortigern to come over and help, supplied the
+original impulse which drove the Angles and Saxons across the sea.
+Whatever its origin--whether pressure from other tribes behind,
+internal dissensions, or the economic necessities of a population
+growing too fast for the produce of primitive farming--the restlessness
+was general; but while the Goths and the Franks poured south over the
+Roman frontiers on land, the Angles and Saxons obeyed a prophetic call
+to the sea and the setting sun.
+
+This migration by sea is a strange phenomenon. That nations should
+wander by land was no new thing; but how in those days whole tribes
+transported themselves, their wives and their chattels, from the mouths
+of the Elbe and the Weser to those of the Thames and the Humber, we are
+at a loss to understand. Yet come they did, and the name of the Angles
+at least, which clung to the land they reached, was blotted out from
+the home they left. It is clear that they came in detachments, as their
+descendants went, centuries later, to a land still further west; and
+the process was spread over a hundred years or more. They conquered
+Britain blindly and piecemeal; and the traditional three years which
+are said to have elapsed between the occupation of Sheppey and the
+landing in Kent prove not that the puny arm of the intervening sea
+deterred those who had crossed the ocean, but that Sheppey was as much
+as these petrels of the storm could manage. The failure to dislodge
+them, and the absence of centralized government and national
+consciousness among the Britons encouraged further invaders; and Kent,
+east of the Medway, and the Isle of Wight may have been the next
+morsels they swallowed. These early comers were Jutes, but their easy
+success led to imitation by their more numerous southern neighbours,
+the Angles and Saxons; and the torrent of conquest grew in volume and
+rapidity. Invaders by sea naturally sailed or rowed up the rivers, and
+all conquerors master the plains before the hills, which are the home
+of lost causes and the refuge of native states. Their progress may be
+traced in the names of English kingdoms and shires: in the south the
+Saxons founded the kingdoms of Sussex, Essex, Middlesex, and Wessex; in
+the east the Anglians founded East Anglia, though in the north they
+retained the Celtic names, Bernicia and Deira. The districts in which
+they met and mingled have less distinctive names; Surrey was perhaps
+disputed between all the Saxon kingdoms, Hampshire between West Saxons,
+South Saxons, and Jutes; while in the centre Mercia was a mixed march
+or borderland of Angles and Saxons against the retiring Britons or
+Welsh.
+
+It used to be almost a point of honour with champions of the
+superiority of Anglo-Saxon virtues to maintain that the invaders, like
+the Israelites of old, massacred their enemies to a man, if not also to
+a woman and child. Massacre there certainly was at Anderida and other
+places taken by storm, and no doubt whole British villages fled at the
+approach of their bloodthirsty foes; but as the wave of conquest rolled
+from east to west, and the concentration of the Britons grew while that
+of the invader relaxed, there was less and less extermination. The
+English hordes cannot have been as numerous in women as in men; and in
+that case some of the British women would be spared. It no more
+required wholesale slaughter of the Britons to establish English
+language and institutions in Britain than it required wholesale
+slaughter of the Irish to produce the same results in Ireland; and a
+large admixture of Celtic blood in the English race can hardly be
+denied.
+
+Moreover, the Anglo-Saxons began to fight one another before they
+ceased to fight their common enemy, who must have profited by this
+internecine strife. Of the process by which the migrating clans and
+families were blended into tribal kingdoms, we learn nothing; but the
+blending favoured expansion, and expansion brought the tribal kingdoms
+into hostile contact with tougher rivals than the Britons. The
+expansion of Sussex and Kent was checked by Saxons who had landed in
+Essex or advanced up the Thames and the Itchen; East Anglia was hemmed
+in by tribes who had sailed up the Wash, the Humber, and their
+tributaries; and the three great kingdoms which emerged out of the
+anarchy--Northumbria, Mercia, and Wessex--seem to have owed the
+supremacy, which they wielded in turn, to the circumstance that each
+possessed a British hinterland into which it could expand. For
+Northumbria there was Strathclyde on the west and Scotland on the
+north; for Mercia there was Wales; and for Wessex there were the
+British remnants in Devon and in Cornwall.
+
+But a kingdom may have too much hinterland. Scotland taxed for
+centuries the assimilative capacity of united England; it was too much
+for Northumbria to digest. Northumbria's supremacy was distinguished by
+the religious labours of Aidan and Cuthbert and Wilfrid in England, by
+the missions of Willibrord on the Continent, and by the revival of
+literature and learning under Caedmon and Bede; but it spent its
+substance in efforts to conquer Scotland, and then fell a victim to the
+barbaric strength of Mercia and to civil strife between its component
+parts, Bernicia and Deira. Mercia was even less homogeneous than
+Northumbria; it had no frontiers worth mention; and in spite of its
+military prowess it could not absorb a hinterland treble the size of
+the Wales which troubled Edward I. Wessex, with serviceable frontiers
+consisting of the Thames, the Cotswolds, the Severn, and the sea, and
+with a hinterland narrowing down to the Cornish peninsula, developed a
+slower but more lasting strength. Political organization seems to have
+been its forte, and it had set its own house in some sort of order
+before it was summoned by Ecgberht to assume the lead in English
+politics. From that day to this the sceptre has remained in his house
+without a permanent break.
+
+Some slight semblance of political unity was thus achieved, but it was
+already threatened by the Northmen and Danes, who were harrying England
+in much the same way as the English, three centuries earlier, had
+harried Britain. The invaders were invaded because they had forsaken
+the sea to fight one another on land; and then Christianity had come to
+tame their turbulent vigour. A wave of missionary zeal from Rome and a
+backwash from unconquered Ireland had met at the synod of Whitby in
+664, and Roman priests recovered what Roman soldiers had lost. But the
+church had not yet armed itself with the weapons of the world, and
+Christian England was no more a match than Christian Britain had been
+for a heathen foe. Ecgberht's feeble successors in Wessex, and their
+feebler rivals in the subordinate kingdoms, gave way step by step
+before the Danes, until in 879 Ecgberht's grandson Alfred the Great
+was, like a second King Arthur, a fugitive lurking in the recesses of
+his disappearing realm.
+
+Wessex, however, was more closely knit than any Celtic realm had been;
+the Danes were fewer than their Anglo-Saxon predecessors; and Alfred
+was made of sterner stuff than early British princes. He was typical of
+Wessex; moral strength and all-round capacity rather than supreme
+ability in any one direction are his title-deeds to greatness. After
+hard fighting he imposed terms of peace upon the Danish leader Guthrum.
+England south-west of Watling Street, which ran from London to Chester,
+was to be Alfred's, the rest to be Danish; and Guthrum succumbed to the
+pacifying influence of Christianity. Not the least of Alfred's gains
+was the destruction of Mercia's unity; its royal house had disappeared
+in the struggle, and the kingdom was now divided; while Alfred lost his
+nominal suzerainty over north-east England, he gained a real
+sovereignty over south-west Mercia. His children, Edward the Elder and
+Ethelfleda, the Lady of the Mercians, and his grandson Athelstan,
+pushed on the expansion of Wessex thus begun, dividing the land as they
+won it into shires, each with a burh (borough) or fortified centre for
+its military organization; and Anglo-Saxon monarchy reached its zenith
+under Edgar, who ruled over the whole of England and asserted a
+suzerainty over most of Britain.
+
+It was transitory glory and superficial unity; for there was no real
+possibility of a national state in Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Danish England,
+and the whole meaning of English history is missed in antedating that
+achievement by several hundred years. Edgar could do no more than evade
+difficulties and temporize with problems which imperceptible growth
+alone could solve; and the idealistic pictures of early England are not
+drawn from life, but inspired by a belief in good old days and an
+unconscious appreciation of the polemical value of such a theory in
+political controversy. Tacitus, a splenetic Roman aristocrat, had
+satirized the degeneracy of the empire under the guise of a description
+of the primitive virtues of a Utopian Germany; and modern theorists
+have found in his _Germania_ an armoury of democratic weapons
+against aristocracy and despotism. From this golden age the Angles and
+Saxons are supposed to have derived a political system in which most
+men were free and equal, owning their land in common, debating and
+deciding in folkmoots the issues of peace and war, electing their kings
+(if any), and obeying them only so far as they inspired respect. These
+idyllic arrangements, if they ever existed, did not survive the stress
+of the migration and the struggle with the Celts. War begat the king,
+and soon the church baptized him and confirmed his power with unction
+and biblical precedents. The moot of the folk became the moot of the
+Wise (Witan), and only those were wise whose wisdom was apparent to the
+king. Community of goods and equality of property broke down in the
+vast appropriation involved in the conquest of Britain; and when, after
+their conversion to Christianity, the barbarians learnt to write and
+left authentic records, they reveal a state of society which bears some
+resemblance to that of medieval England but little to that of the
+mythical golden age.
+
+Upon a nation of freemen in arms had been superimposed a class of
+military specialists, of whom the king was head. Specialization had
+broken down the system by which all men did an equal amount of
+everything. The few, who were called thegns, served the king, generally
+by fighting his enemies, while the many worked for themselves and for
+those who served the king. All holders of land, however, had to serve
+in the national levy and to help in maintaining the bridges and
+primitive fortifications. But there were endless degrees of inequality
+in wealth; some now owned but a fraction of what had been the normal
+share of a household in the land; others held many shares, and the
+possession of five shares became the dividing line between the class
+from which the servants of the king were chosen and the rest of the
+community. While this inequality increased, the tenure of land grew
+more and more important as the basis of social position and political
+influence. Land has little value for nomads, but so soon as they settle
+its worth begins to grow; and the more labour they put into the land,
+the higher rises its value and the less they want to leave it; in a
+purely agricultural community land is the great source of everything
+worth having, and therefore the main object of desire.
+
+But it became increasingly difficult for the small man to retain his
+holding. He needed protection, especially during the civil wars of the
+Heptarchy and the Danish inroads which followed. There was, however, no
+government strong enough to afford protection, and he had to seek it
+from the nearest magnate, who might possess armed servants to defend
+him, and perhaps a rudimentary stronghold within which he might shelter
+himself and his belongings till the storm was past. The magnate
+naturally wanted his price for these commodities, and the only price
+that would satisfy him was the poor man's land. So many poor men
+surrendered the ownership of their land, receiving it back to be held
+by them as tenants on condition of rendering various services to the
+landlord, such as ploughing his land, reaping his crops, and other
+work. Generally, too, the tenant became the landlord's "man," and did
+him homage; and, thirdly, he would be bound to attend the court in
+which the lord or his steward exercised jurisdiction.
+
+This growth of private jurisdiction was another sign of the times.
+Justice had once been administered in the popular moots, though from
+very early times there had been social distinctions. Each village had
+its "best" men, generally four in number, who attended the moots of the
+larger districts called the Hundreds; and the "best" were probably
+those who had inherited or acquired the best homesteads. This
+aristocracy sometimes shrank to one, and the magnate, to whom the poor
+surrendered their land in return for protection, often acquired also
+rights of jurisdiction, receiving the fines and forfeits imposed for
+breaches of the law. He was made responsible, too, for the conduct of
+his poorer neighbours. Originally the family had been made to answer
+for the offences of its members; but the tie of blood-relationship
+weakened as the bond of neighbourhood grew stronger with attachment to
+the soil; and instead of the natural unit of the family, an artificial
+unit was created for the purpose of responsibility to the law by
+associating neighbours together in groups of ten, called peace-pledges
+or frith-borhs. It is at least possible that the "Hundred" was a
+further association of ten frith-borhs as a higher and more responsible
+unit for the administration of justice. But the landless man was
+worthless as a member of a frith-borh, for the law had little hold over
+a man who had no land to forfeit and no fixed habitation. So the
+landless man was compelled by law to submit to a lord, who was held
+responsible for the behaviour of all his "men"; his estate became, so
+to speak, a private frith-borh, consisting of dependents instead of the
+freemen of the public frith-borhs. These two systems, with many
+variations, existed side by side; but there was a general tendency for
+the freemen to get fewer and for the lords to grow more powerful.
+
+This growth of over-mighty subjects was due to the fact that a
+government which could not protect the poorest could not restrain the
+local magnates to whom the poor were forced to turn; and the weakness
+of the government was due ultimately to the lack of political education
+and of material resources. The mass of Englishmen were locally minded;
+there was nothing to suggest national unity to their imagination. They
+could not read, they had no maps, nor pictures of crowned sovereigns,
+not even a flag to wave; none, indeed, of those symbols which bring
+home to the peasant or artisan a consciousness that he belongs to a
+national entity. Their interests centred round the village green; the
+"best" men travelled further afield to the hundred and shire-moot, but
+anything beyond these limits was distant and unreal, the affair of an
+outside world with which they had no concern. Anglo-Saxon patriotism
+never transcended provincial boundaries.
+
+The government, on the other hand, possessed no proper roads, no
+regular means of communication, none of those nerves which enable it to
+feel what goes on in distant parts. The king, indeed, was beginning to
+supply the deficiencies of local and popular organization: a special
+royal peace or protection, which meant specially severe penalties to
+the offender, was being thrown over special places like highways,
+markets, boroughs, and churches; over special times like Sundays, holy
+days, and the meeting-days of moots; and over special persons like
+priests and royal officials. The church, too, strove to set an example
+of centralized administration; but its organization was still monastic
+rather than parochial and episcopal, and even Dunstan failed to cleanse
+it of sloth and simony. With no regular system of taxation, little
+government machinery, and no police, standing army, or royal judges, it
+was impossible to enforce royal protection adequately, or to check the
+centrifugal tendency of England to break up into its component parts.
+The monarchy was a man rather than a machine; a vigorous ruler could
+make some impression, but whenever the crown passed to a feeble king,
+the reign of anarchy recommenced.
+
+Alfred's successors annexed the Danelaw which Alfred had left to
+Guthrum, but their efforts to assimilate the Danes provoked in the
+first place a reaction against West Saxon influence which threatened
+more than once to separate England north of the Thames from Wessex,
+and, secondly, a determination on the part of Danes across the sea to
+save their fellow-countrymen in England from absorption. Other causes
+no doubt assisted to bring about a renewal of Danish invasion; but the
+Danes who came at the end of the tenth century, if they began as
+haphazard bands of rovers, greedy of spoil and ransom, developed into
+the emissaries of an organized government bent on political conquest.
+Ethelred, who had to suffer from evils that were incurable as well as
+for his predecessors' neglect, bought off the raiders with ever-
+increasing bribes which tempted them to return; and by levying Danegeld
+to stop invasion, set a precedent for direct taxation which the
+invaders eventually used as the financial basis of efficient
+government. At length a foolish massacre of the Danish "uitlanders" in
+England precipitated the ruin of Anglo-Saxon monarchy; and after heroic
+resistance by Edmund Ironside, England was absorbed in the empire of
+Canute.
+
+Canute tried to put himself into the position, while avoiding the
+mistakes, of his English predecessors. He adopted the Christian
+religion and set up a force of hus-earls to terrify local magnates and
+enforce obedience to the English laws which he re-enacted. His division
+of England into four great earldoms seems to have been merely a casual
+arrangement, but he does not appear to have checked the dangerous
+practice by which under Edgar and Ethelred the ealdormen had begun to
+concentrate in their hands the control of various shires. The greater
+the sphere of a subject's jurisdiction, the more it menaced the
+monarchy and national unity; and after Canute's empire had fallen to
+pieces under his worthless sons, the restoration of Ecgberht's line in
+the person of Edward the Confessor merely provided a figurehead under
+whose nominal rule the great earls of Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, and
+East Anglia fought at first for control of the monarchy and at length
+for the crown itself. The strife resolved itself into a faction fight
+between the Mercian house of Leofric and the West Saxon house of
+Godwine, whose dynastic policy has been magnified into patriotism by a
+great West Saxon historian. The prize fell for the moment on Edward's
+death to Godwine's son, Harold, whose ambition to sit on a throne cost
+him his life and the glory, which otherwise might have been his, of
+saving his country from William the Norman. As regent for one of the
+scions of Ecgberht's house, he might have relied on the co-operation of
+his rivals; as an upstart on the throne he could only count on the
+veiled or open enmity of Mercians and Northumbrians, who regarded him,
+and were regarded by him, as hardly less foreign than the invader from
+France.
+
+The battle of Hastings sums up a series and clinches an argument.
+Anglo-Saxondom had only been saved from Danish marauders by the
+personal greatness of Alfred; it had utterly failed to respond to
+Edmund's call to arms against Canute, and the respite under Edward the
+Confessor had been frittered away. Angles and Saxons invited foreign
+conquest by a civil war; and when Harold beat back Tostig and his
+Norwegian ally, the sullen north left him alone to do the same by
+William. William's was the third and decisive Danish conquest of a
+house divided against itself; for his Normans were Northmen with a
+French polish, and they conquered a country in which the soundest
+elements were already Danish. The stoutest resistance, not only in the
+military but in the constitutional and social sense, to the Norman
+Conquest was offered not by Wessex but by the Danelaw, where personal
+freedom had outlived its hey-day elsewhere; and the reflection that,
+had the English re-conquest of the Danelaw been more complete, so, too,
+would have been the Norman Conquest of England, may modify the view
+that everything great and good in England is Anglo-Saxon in origin.
+England, indeed, was still in the crudest stages of its making; it had
+as yet no law worth the name, no trial by jury, no parliament, no real
+constitution, no effective army or navy, no universities, few schools,
+hardly any literature, and little art. The disjointed and unruly
+members of which it consisted in 1066 had to undergo a severe
+discipline before they could form an organic national state.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND
+
+1066-1272
+
+
+For nearly two centuries after the Norman Conquest there is no history
+of the English people. There is history enough of England, but it is
+the history of a foreign government. We may now feel pride in the
+strength of our conqueror or pretend claims to descent from William's
+companions. We may boast of the empire of Henry II and the prowess of
+Richard I, and we may celebrate the organized law and justice, the
+scholarship and the architecture, of the early Plantagenet period; but
+these things were no more English than the government of India to-day
+is Hindu. With Waltheof and Hereward English names disappear from
+English history, from the roll of sovereigns, ministers, bishops,
+earls, and sheriffs; and their place is taken by names beginning with
+"fitz" and distinguished by "de." No William, Thomas, Henry, Geoffrey,
+Gilbert, John, Stephen, Richard, or Robert had played any part in
+Anglo-Saxon affairs, but they fill the pages of England's history from
+the days of Harold to those of Edward I. The English language went
+underground, and became the patois of peasants; the thin trickle of
+Anglo-Saxon literature dried up, for there was no demand for Anglo-
+Saxon among an upper class which wrote Latin and spoke French.
+Foreigners ruled and owned the land, and "native" became synonymous
+with "serf."
+
+Their common lot, however, gave birth to a common feeling. The Norman
+was more alien to the Mercian than had been Northumbrian or West-Saxon,
+and rival tribes at last discovered a bond of unity in the impartial
+rigour of their masters. The Norman, coming from outside and exempt
+from local prejudice, applied the same methods of government and
+exploitation to all parts of England, just as Englishmen bring the same
+ideas to bear upon all parts of India; and in both cases the steady
+pressure of a superimposed civilization tended to obliterate local and
+class divisions. Unwittingly Norman and Angevin despotism made an
+English nation out of Anglo-Saxon tribes, as English despotism has made
+a nation out of Irish septs, and will make another out of the hundred
+races and religions of our Indian empire. The more efficient a
+despotism, the sooner it makes itself impossible, and the greater the
+problems it stores up for the future, unless it can divest itself of
+its despotic attributes and make common cause with the nation it has
+created.
+
+The provision of this even-handed tyranny was the great contribution of
+the Normans to the making of England. They had no written law of their
+own, but to secure themselves they had to enforce order upon their
+schismatic subjects; and they were able to enforce it because, as
+military experts, they had no equals in that age. They could not have
+stood against a nation in arms; but the increasing cost of equipment
+and the growth of poor and landless classes among the Anglo-Saxons had
+transferred the military business of the nation into the hands of large
+landowning specialists; and the Anglo-Saxon warrior was no match for
+his Norman rival, either individually or collectively. His burh was
+inferior to the Norman castle, his shield and battle-axe to the weapons
+of the mailed and mounted knight; and he had none of the coherence that
+was forced upon the conquerors by the iron hand of William and by their
+situation amid a hostile people.
+
+The problem for William and his companions was how to organize this
+military superiority as a means of orderly government, and this problem
+wore a twofold aspect. William had to control his barons, and his
+barons had to control their vassals. Their methods have been summed up
+in the phrase, the "feudal system," which William is still popularly
+supposed to have introduced into England. On the other hand, it has
+been humourously suggested that the feudal system was really introduced
+into England by Sir Henry Spelman, a seventeenth-century scholar.
+Others have maintained that, so far from feudalism being introduced
+from Normandy into England, it would be truer to say that feudalism was
+introduced from England into Normandy, and thence spread throughout
+France. These speculations serve, at any rate, to show that feudalism
+was a very vague and elusive system, consisting of generalizations from
+a vast number of conflicting data. Spelman was the first to attempt to
+reduce these data to a system, and his successors tended to forget more
+and more the exceptions to his rules. It is now clear that much that we
+call feudal existed in England before the Norman Conquest; that much of
+it was not developed until after the Norman period; and that at no time
+did feudalism exist as a completely rounded and logical system outside
+historical and legal text-books.
+
+The political and social arrangements summed up in the phrase related
+primarily to the land and the conditions of service upon which it was
+held. Commerce and manufactures, and the organization of towns which
+grew out of them, were always exceptions to the feudal system; the
+monarchy saved itself, its sheriffs, and the shires to some extent from
+feudal influence; and soon it set to work to redeem the administration
+of justice from its clutches. In all parts of the country, moreover,
+there was land, the tenure of which was never feudalized. Generally,
+however, the theory was applied that all land was held directly or
+indirectly from the king, who was the sole owner of it, that there was
+no land without a lord, and that from every acre of land some sort of
+service was due to some one or other. A great deal of it was held by
+military service; the tenant-in-chief of this land, who might be either
+a layman or an ecclesiastic, had to render this military service to the
+king, while the sub-tenants had to render it to the tenants-in-chief.
+When the tenant died his land reverted to the lord, who only granted it
+to the heir after the payment of a year's revenue, and on condition of
+the same service being rendered. If the heir were a minor, and thus
+incapable of rendering military service, the land was retained by the
+lord until the heir came of age; heiresses could only marry with the
+lord's leave some one who could perform his services. The tenant had
+further to attend the lord's court--whether the lord was his king or
+not--submit to his jurisdiction, and pay aids to the lord whenever he
+was captured and needed ransom, when his eldest son was made a knight,
+and when his eldest daughter married.
+
+Other land was held by churchmen on condition of praying or singing for
+the soul of the lord, and the importance of this tenure was that it was
+subject to the church courts and not to those of the king. Some was
+held in what was called free socage, the terms of which varied; but its
+distinguishing feature seems to have been that the service, which was
+not military, was fixed, and that when it was performed the lord had no
+further hold on the tenant. The great mass of the population were,
+however, villeins, who were always at the beck and call of their lords,
+and had to do as much ploughing, sowing, and reaping of his land as he
+could make them. Theoretically they were his goods and chattels, who
+could obtain no redress against any one except in the lord's court, and
+none at all against him. They could not leave their land, nor marry,
+nor enter the church, nor go to school without his leave. All these
+forms of tenure and kinds of service, however, shaded off into one
+another, so that it is impossible to draw hard and fast lines between
+them. Any one, moreover, might hold different lands on different terms
+of service, so that there was little of caste in the English system; it
+was upon the land and not the person that the service was imposed; and
+William's Domesday Book was not a record of the ranks and classes of
+the people, but a survey of the land, detailing the rents and service
+due from every part.
+
+The local agency by which the Normans enforced these arrangements was
+the manor. The Anglo-Saxons had organized shires and hundreds, but the
+lowest unit, township or vill seems to have had no organization except,
+perhaps, for agricultural purposes. The Danegeld, which William imposed
+after the Domesday survey, was assessed on the hundreds, as though
+there were no smaller units from which it could be levied. But the
+hundred was found too cumbrous for the efficient control of local
+details; it was divided into manors, the Normans using for this purpose
+the germs of dependent townships which had long been growing up in
+England; and the agricultural organization of the township was
+dovetailed into the jurisdictional organization of the manor. The lord
+became the lord of all the land on the manor, the owner of a court
+which tried local disputes; but he rarely possessed that criminal
+jurisdiction in matters of life and death which was common in
+continental feudalism; and if he did, it was only by special royal
+grant, and he was gradually deprived of it by the development of royal
+courts of justice, which drew to themselves large parts of manorial
+jurisdiction.
+
+These and other matters were reserved for the old courts of the shire
+and hundred, which the Norman kings found it advisable to encourage as
+a check upon their barons; for the more completely the natives and
+villagers were subjected to their lords, the more necessary was it for
+the king to maintain his hold upon their masters. For this reason
+William imposed the famous Salisbury oath. In France the sub-tenant was
+bound to follow and obey his immediate lord rather than the king.
+William was determined that every man's duty to the king should come
+first. Similarly, he separated church courts from the secular courts,
+in order that the former might be saved from the feudal influence of
+the latter; and he enforced the ecclesiastical reforms of Hildebrand,
+especially the prohibition of the marriage of the clergy, lest they
+should convert their benefices into hereditary fiefs for the benefit of
+their children.
+
+For the principles of heredity and primogeniture were among the
+strongest of feudal tendencies. Primogeniture had proved politically
+advantageous; and one of the best things in the Anglo-Saxon monarchy
+had been its avoidance of the practice, prevalent on the Continent, of
+kings dividing their dominions among their sons, instead of leaving all
+united to the eldest. But the principle of heredity, sound enough in
+national monarchy, was to prove very dangerous in the other spheres of
+politics. Office tended to become hereditary, and to be regarded as the
+private property of the family rather than a position of national
+trust, thus escaping national control and being prostituted for
+personal ends. The earldoms in England were so perverted; originally
+they were offices like the modern lords-lieutenancies of the shires;
+gradually they became hereditary titles. The only remedy the king had
+was to deprive the earls of their power, and entrust it to a nominal
+deputy, the sheriff. In France, the sheriff  (_vice-comes_, _vicomte_)
+became hereditary in his turn, and a prolonged struggle over the same
+tendency was fought in England. Fortunately, the crown and country
+triumphed over the hereditary principle in this respect; the sheriff
+remained an official, and when viscounts were created later, in
+imitation of the French nobility, they received only a meaningless and
+comparatively innocuous title.
+
+Some slight check, too, was retained upon the crown owing to a series
+of disputed successions to the throne. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy had
+always been in theory elective, and William had been careful to observe
+the form. His son, William II, had to obtain election in order to
+secure the throne against the claims of his elder brother Robert, and
+Henry I followed his example for similar reasons. Each had to make
+election promises in the form of a charter; and election promises,
+although they were seldom kept, had some value as reminders to kings of
+their duties and theoretical dependence upon the electors. Gradually,
+too, the kings began to look for support outside their Norman baronage,
+and to realize that even the submerged English might serve as a
+makeweight in a balance of opposing forces. Henry I bid for London's
+support by the grant of a notable charter; for, assisted by the order
+and communications with the Continent fostered by Norman rule, commerce
+was beginning to flourish and towns to grow. London was already
+distancing Winchester in their common ambition to be the capital of the
+kingdom, and the support of it and of other towns began to be worth
+buying by grants of local government, more especially as their
+encouragement provided another check on feudal magnates. Henry, too,
+made a great appeal to English sentiment by marrying Matilda, the
+granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, and by revenging the battle of
+Hastings through a conquest of Normandy from his brother Robert,
+effected partly by English troops.
+
+But the order, which the three Norman sovereigns evolved out of chaos,
+was still due more to their personal vigour than to the strength of the
+administrative machinery which they sought to develop; and though that
+machinery continued to work during the anarchy which followed, it could
+not restrain the feudal barons, when the crown was disputed between
+Henry's daughter Matilda and his nephew Stephen. The barons, indeed,
+had been more successful in riveting their baronial yoke on the people
+than the kings had been in riveting a monarchical yoke on the barons;
+and nothing more vividly illustrates the utter subjection of Anglo-
+Saxons than the fact that the conquerors could afford to tear each
+other to pieces for nineteen years (1135-1154) without the least
+attempt on the part of their subjects to throw off their tyranny. There
+was no English nation yet; each feudal magnate did what he pleased with
+his own without fear of royal or popular vengeance, and for once in
+English history, at any rate, the lords vindicated their independence.
+The church was the only other body which profited by the strife; within
+its portals and its courts there was some law and order, some peace and
+refuge from the worldly welter; and it seized the opportunity to
+broaden its jurisdiction, magnify its law, exalt its privileges, and
+assert that to it belonged principally the right to elect and to depose
+sovereigns. Greater still would have been its services to civilization,
+had it been able to assert a power of putting down the barons from
+their castles and raising the peasantry from their bondage.
+
+Deliverance could only come by royal power, and in Henry II, Matilda's
+son, Anjou gave England a greater king than Normandy had done in
+William the Bastard. Although a foreigner, who ruled a vast continental
+empire and spent but a fraction of his days on this side of the
+Channel, he stands second to none of England's makers. He fashioned the
+government which hammered together the framework of a national state.
+First, he gathered up such fragments of royal authority as survived the
+anarchy; then, with the conservative instincts and pretences of a
+radical, he looked about for precedents in the customs of his
+grandfather, proclaiming his intention of restoring good old laws. This
+reaction brought him up against the encroachments of the church, and
+the untoward incident of Becket's murder impaired the success of
+Henry's efforts to establish royal supremacy. But this supremacy must
+not be exaggerated. Henry did not usurp ecclesiastical jurisdiction; he
+wanted to see that the clerical courts did their duty; he claimed the
+power of moving them in this direction; and he hoped to make the crown
+the arbiter of disputes between the rival spiritual and temporal
+jurisdictions, realizing that the only alternative to this supreme
+authority was the arbitrament of war. He also contended that clergy who
+had been unfrocked in the clerical courts for murder or other crimes
+should be handed over as laymen to be further punished according to the
+law of the land, while Becket maintained that unfrocking was a
+sufficient penalty for the first offence, and that it required a second
+murder to hang a former priest.
+
+Next, he sought to curb the barons. He instituted scutage, by which the
+great feudatories granted a money payment instead of bringing with them
+to the army hordes of their sub-tenants who might obey them rather than
+the king; this enabled the king to hire mercenaries who respected him
+but not the feudatories. He cashiered all the sheriffs at once, to
+explode their pretensions to hereditary tenure of their office. By the
+assize of arms he called the mass of Englishmen to redress the military
+balance between the barons and the crown. By other assizes he enabled
+the owners and possessors of property to appeal to the protection of
+the royal court of justice: instead of trial by battle they could
+submit their case to a jury of neighbours; and the weapons of the
+military expert were thus superseded by the verdicts of peaceful
+citizens.
+
+This method, which was extended to criminal as well as civil cases, of
+ascertaining the truth and deciding disputes by means of juratores, men
+sworn to tell the truth impartially, involved a vast educational
+process. Hitherto men had regarded the ascertainment of truth as a
+supernatural task, and they had abandoned it to Providence or the
+priests. Each party to a dispute had been required to produce oath-
+helpers or compurgators and each compurgator's oath was valued
+according to his property, just as the number of a man's votes is still
+proportioned to some extent to his possessions. But if, as commonly
+happened, both parties produced the requisite oath-helpers, there was
+nothing for it but the ordeal by fire or water; the man who sank was
+innocent, he who floated guilty; and the only rational element in the
+ritual was its supervision by the priests, who knew something of their
+parishioners' character. Military tenants, however, preferred their
+privilege of trial by battle. Now Henry began to teach men to rely upon
+their judgment; and by degrees a distinction was even made between
+murder and homicide, which had hitherto been confounded because "the
+thought of man shall not be tried, for the devil himself knoweth not
+the thought of man."
+
+In order to carry out his judicial reforms, Henry developed the
+_curia regis_, or royal court of justice. That court had simply
+been the court of the king's barons corresponding to the court of his
+tenants which every feudal lord possessed. Its financial aspect had
+already been specialized as the exchequer by the Norman kings, who had
+realized that finance is the first essential of efficient government.
+From finance Henry I had gone on to the administration of justice,
+because _justitia magnum emolumentum_, the administration of
+justice is a great source of profit. Henry II's zeal for justice sprang
+from similar motives: the more justice he could draw from the feudal
+courts to his own, the greater the revenue he would divert from his
+unruly barons into the royal exchequer. From the central stores of the
+_curia regis_ he dispensed a justice that was cheaper, more
+expeditious, and more expert, than that provided by the local courts.
+He threw open its doors to all except villeins, he transformed it from
+an occasional assembly of warlike barons into a regular court of
+trained lawyers--mere servants of the royal household, the barons
+called them; and by means of justices in eyre he brought it into touch
+with all localities in the kingdom, and convinced his people that there
+was a king who meant to govern with their help.
+
+These experts had a free hand as regards the law they administered. The
+old Anglo-Saxon customs which had done duty for law had degenerated
+into antiquated formalities, varying in almost every shire and hundred,
+which were perforce ignored by Henry's judges because they were
+incomprehensible. So much as they understood and approved they blended
+with principles drawn from the revived study of Roman law and with
+Frankish and Norman customs. The legal rules thus elaborated by the
+king's court were applied by the justices in eyre where-ever their
+circuits took them, and became in time the common law of England,
+common because it admitted no local bars and no provincial prejudices.
+One great stride had been taken in the making of the English nation,
+when the king's court, trespassing upon local popular and feudal
+jurisdiction, dumped upon the Anglo-Saxon market the following among
+other foreign legal concepts--assize, circuit, suit, plaintiff,
+defendant, maintenance, livery, possession, property, probate,
+recovery, trespass, treason, felony, fine, coroner, court, inquest,
+judge, jury, justice, verdict, taxation, charter, liberty,
+representation, parliament, and constitution. It is difficult to over-
+estimate the debt the English people owe to their powers of absorbing
+imports. The very watchwords of progress and catchwords of liberty,
+from the trial by jury which was ascribed to Alfred the Great to the
+charter extorted from John, were alien immigrants. We call them alien
+because they were alien to the Anglo-Saxons; but they are the warp and
+woof of English institutions, which are too great and too complex to
+have sprung from purely insular sources.
+
+In spite of the fierce opposition of the barons, who rebelled in 1173,
+and of disputes with his fractious children which embittered his
+closing years, Henry II had laid the foundations of national monarchy.
+But in completing one part of the Norman Conquest, namely, the
+establishment of royal supremacy over disorderly feudatories, he had
+modified the other, the arbitrary rule of the barons over the subject
+people. William had only conquered the people by the help of his
+barons; Henry II only crushed the barons with the help of lower orders
+and of ministers raised from the ranks. It was left for his sons to
+alienate the support which he had enlisted, and to show that, if the
+first condition of progress was the restraint of the barons, the second
+was the curbing of the crown. Their reigns illustrate the ineradicable
+defect of arbitrary rule: a monarch of genius creates an efficient
+despotism, and is allowed to create it, to deal with evils that yield
+to no milder treatment. His successors proceed to use that machinery
+for personal ends. Richard I gilded his abuse of his father's power
+with the glory of his crusade, and the end afforded a plausible
+justification for the means he adopted. But John cloaked his tyranny
+with no specious pretences; his greed and violence spared no section of
+the community, and forced all into a coalition which extorted from him
+the Great Charter.
+
+This famous document betrays its composite authorship; no section of
+the community entered the coalition without something to gain, and none
+went entirely unrewarded from Runnymede. But if Sir Henry Spelman
+introduced feudalism into England, his contemporary, Chief-justice
+Coke, invented Magna Carta: and in view of the profound misconceptions
+which prevail with regard to its character, it is necessary to insist
+rather upon its reactionary than upon its reforming elements. The great
+source of error lies in the change which is always insensibly, but
+sometimes completely, transforming the meaning of words. Generally the
+change has been from the concrete to the abstract, because in their
+earlier stages of education men find it very difficult to grasp
+anything which is not concrete. The word "liberty" affords a good
+illustration: in 1215 a "liberty" was the possession by a definite
+person or group of persons of very definite and tangible privileges,
+such as having a court of your own with its perquisites, or exemption
+from the duties of attending the public courts of the shire or hundred,
+of rendering the services or of paying the dues to which the majority
+were liable. The value of a "liberty" was that through its enjoyment
+you were not as other men; the barons would have eared little for
+liberties which they had to share with the common herd. To them liberty
+meant privilege and monopoly; it was not a general right to be enjoyed
+in common. Now Magna Carta is a charter not of "liberty," but of
+"liberties"; it guaranteed to each section of the coalition those
+special privileges which Henry II and his sons had threatened or taken
+away. Some of these liberties were dangerous obstacles to the common
+welfare--for instance the "liberty" of every lord of the manor to try
+all suits relating to property and possession in his own manorial
+court, or to be punished by his fellow-barons instead of by the judges
+of the king's court. This was what the barons meant by their famous
+demand in Magna Carta that every man should be judged by his peers;
+they insisted that the royal judges were not their peers, but only
+servants of the crown, and their demands in these respects were
+reactionary proposals which might have been fatal to liberty as we
+conceive it.
+
+Nor is there anything about trial by jury or "no taxation without
+representation" in Magna Carta. What we mean by "trial by jury" was not
+developed till long after 1215; there was still no national, but only
+class taxation; and the great council, which was to give its assent to
+royal demands for money, represented nobody but the tenants-in-chief of
+whom it was composed. All that the barons meant by this clause was that
+they, as feudal tenants-in-chief, were not to pay more than the
+ordinary feudal dues. But they left to the king, and they reserved to
+themselves, the right to tallage their villeins as arbitrarily as they
+pleased; and even where they seem to be protecting the villeins, they
+are only preventing the king from levying such judicial fines from
+their villeins as would make it impossible for those villeins to render
+their services to the lords. It was to be no affair of the king or
+nation if a lord exacted the uttermost farthing from his own chattels;
+legally, the villeins, who were the bulk of the nation, remained after
+Magna Carta, as before, in the position of a man's ox or horse to-day,
+except that there was no law for the prevention of cruelty to animals.
+Finally, the provision that no one was to be arrested until he had been
+convicted would, if carried out, have made impossible the
+administration of justice.
+
+On the other hand, the provisions for the fixing of the court of common
+pleas at Westminster, for standard weights and measures, for the
+administration of law by men acquainted with English customs, and some
+others were wholesome reforms. The first clause, guaranteeing that the
+church should be free from royal (not papal) encroachments, was sound
+enough when John was king, and the general restraint of his authority,
+even in the interests of the barons, was not an unmixed evil. But it is
+as absurd to think that John conceded modern liberty when he granted
+the charter of medieval liberties, as to think that he permitted some
+one to found a new religion when he licensed him to endow a new
+religious house (_novam religionem_); and to regard Magna Carta as
+a great popular achievement, when no vernacular version of it is known
+to have existed before the sixteenth century, and when it contains
+hardly a word or an idea of popular English origin, involves complete
+misunderstanding of its meaning and a serious antedating of English
+nationality.
+
+At no time, indeed, did foreign influence appear more dominant in
+English politics than during the generation which saw Richard I
+surrender his kingdom to be held as a fief of the empire, and John
+surrender it to be held as a temporal fief of the papacy; or when, in
+the reign of Henry III, a papal legate, Gualo, administered England as
+a province of the Papal States; when a foreign freebooter was sheriff
+of six English shires; and when aliens held in their hands the castles
+and keys of the kingdom. It was a dark hour which preceded the dawn of
+English nationality, and so far there was no sign of English
+indignation at the bartering of England's independence. Resistance
+there was, but it came from men who were only a degree less alien than
+those whose domination they resented.
+
+Yet a governing class, planted by Henry II, was striking root in
+English soil and drawing nourishment and inspiration from English
+feelings. It was reinforced by John's loss of Normandy, which compelled
+bi-national barons who held lands in both countries to choose between
+their French and English sovereigns; and those who preferred England
+became more English than they had been before. The French invasion of
+England, which followed John's repudiation of the charter, widened the
+cleavage; and there was something national, if little that was English,
+in the government of Hubert de Burgh, and still more in the naval
+victory which Hubert and the men of the Cinque Ports won over the
+French in the Straits of Dover in 1217. But not a vestige of national
+feeling animated Henry III; and for twenty-five wearisome years after
+he had attained his majority he strove to govern England by means of
+alien relatives and dependents.
+
+The opposition offered by the great council was baronial rather than
+national; the revolt in which it ended was a revolt of the half-breeds
+rather than a revolt of the English; and the government they
+established in 1258 was merely a legalized form of baronial anarchy.
+But there was this difference between the anarchy of Stephen's reign
+and that of Henry III's: now, when the foreigners fell out, the English
+began to come by their own. A sort of "young England" party fell foul
+of both the barons and the king; Simon de Montfort detached himself
+from the baronial brethren with whom he had acted, and boldly placed
+himself at the head of a movement for securing England for the English.
+He summoned representatives from cities and boroughs to sit side by
+side with greater and lesser barons in the great council of the realm,
+which now became an English parliament; and for the first time since
+the Norman Conquest men of the subject race were called up to
+deliberate on national affairs. It does not matter whether this was the
+stroke of a statesman's genius or the lucky improvisation of a party-
+leader. Simon fell, but his work remained; Prince Edward, who copied
+his tactics at Evesham, copied his politics in 1275 and afterwards at
+Westminster; and under the first sovereign since the Norman Conquest
+who bore an English name, the English people received their national
+livery and the seisin of their inheritance.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE
+
+1272-1485
+
+
+In 1265, simultaneously with the appearance of English townsfolk in
+parliament, an official document couched in the English tongue appeared
+like a first peak above the subsiding flood of foreign language. When,
+three generations back, Abbot Samson had preached English sermons, they
+were noted as exceptions; but now the vernacular language of the
+subject race was forcing its way into higher circles, and even into
+literary use. The upper classes were learning English, and those whose
+normal tongue was English were thrusting themselves into, or at any
+rate upon the notice of, the higher strata of society.
+
+The two normal ranks of feudal society had in England naturally been
+French lords and English tillers of the soil; but commerce had never
+accommodated itself to this agricultural system, and the growth of
+trade, of towns, of other forms of wealth than land, tended
+concurrently to break down French and feudal domination. A large number
+of towns had been granted, or rather sold, charters by Richard I and
+John, not because those monarchs were interested in municipal
+development, but because they wanted money, and in their rights of
+jurisdiction over towns on the royal domain they possessed a ready
+marketable commodity. The body which had the means to pay the king's
+price was generally the local merchant guild; and while these
+transactions developed local government, they did not necessarily
+promote popular self-government, because the merchant guild was a
+wealthy oligarchical body, and it might exercise the jurisdiction it
+had bought from the king in quite as narrow and harsh a spirit as he
+had done. The consequent quarrels between town oligarchies and town
+democracies do not, however, justify the common assumption that there
+had once been an era of municipal democracy which gradually gave way to
+oligarchy and corruption. Nevertheless, these local bodies were
+English, and legally their members had been villeins; and their
+experience in local government prepared them for admittance to that
+share in national government which the development of taxation made
+almost necessary.
+
+Henry II's scheme of active and comprehensive administration, indeed,
+led by a natural sequence to the parliament of Edward I and further.
+The more a government tries to do, the more taxation it must impose;
+and the broadening of the basis of taxation led gradually to the
+broadening of the basis of representation, for taxation is the mother
+of representation. So long as real property only--that is to say, the
+ownership of land--was taxed, the great council contained only the
+great landowners. But Henry II had found it necessary to tax personalty
+as well, both clerical and lay, and so by slow steps his successors in
+the thirteenth century were driven to admit payers of taxes on
+personalty to the great council. This representative system must not be
+regarded as a concession to a popular demand for national self-
+government. When in 1791 a beneficent British parliament granted a
+popular assembly to the French Canadians, they looked askance and
+muttered, "_C'est une machine anglaise pour nous taxer_"; and
+Edward I's people would have been justified in entertaining the
+suspicion that it was their money he wanted, not their advice, and
+still less their control. He wished taxes to be voted in the royal
+palace at Westminster, just as Henry I had insisted upon bishops being
+elected in the royal chapel. In the royal presence burgesses and
+knights of the shire would be more liberal with their constituents'
+money than those constituents would be with their own when there were
+neighbours to encourage resistance to a merely distant terror.
+
+The representation people had enjoyed in the shire and hundred moots
+had been a boon, not because it enabled a few privileged persons to
+attend, but because by their attendance the mass were enabled to stay
+away. If the lord or his steward would go in person, his attendance
+exempted all his tenants; if he would not, the reeve and four "best"
+men from each township had to go. The "best," moreover, were not chosen
+by election; the duty and burden was attached to the "best" holdings in
+the township, and in the thirteenth century the sheriff was hard put to
+it to secure an adequate representation. This "suit of court" was, in
+fact, an obligatory service, and membership of parliament was long
+regarded in a similar light. Parliament did not clamour to be created;
+it was forced by an enlightened monarchy on a less enlightened people.
+A parliamentary "summons" had the imperative, minatory sound which now
+only attaches to its police court use; and centuries later members were
+occasionally "bound over" to attend at Westminster, and prosecuted if
+they failed. On one occasion the two knights for Oxfordshire fled the
+country on hearing of their election, and were proclaimed outlaws.
+Members of parliament were, in fact, the scapegoats for the people, who
+were all "intended" or understood to be present in parliament, but
+enjoyed the privilege of absence through representation. The greater
+barons never secured this privilege; they had to come in person when
+summoned, just as they had to serve in person when the king went to the
+wars. Gradually, of course, this attitude towards representation
+changed as parliament grasped control of the public purse, and with it
+the power of taxing its foes and sparing its friends. In other than
+financial matters it began to pay to be a member; and then it suited
+magnates not only to come in person but to represent the people in the
+Lower House, the social quality of which developed with the growth of
+its power. Only in very recent times has the House of Commons again
+included such representatives as these whose names are taken from the
+official returns for the parliaments of Edward I: John the Baker,
+William the Tailor, Thomas the Summoner, Andrew the Piper, Walter the
+Spicer, Roger the Draper, Richard the Dyer, Henry the Butcher, Durant
+the Cordwainer, John the Taverner, William the Red of Bideford, Citizen
+Richard (Ricardus Civis), and William the priest's son.
+
+The appearance of emancipated villeins side by side with earls and
+prelates in the great council of the realm is the most significant fact
+of thirteenth-century English history. The people of England were
+beginning to have a history which was not merely that of an alien
+government; and their emergence is traceable not only in language,
+literature, and local and national politics, but also in the art of
+war. Edward I discovered in his Welsh wars that the long-bow was more
+efficient than the weapons of the knight; and his grandson won English
+victories at Crecy and Poitiers with a weapon which was within the
+reach of the simple yeoman. The discovery of gunpowder and development
+of artillery soon proved as fatal to the feudal castle as the long-bow
+had to the mailed knight; and when the feudal classes had lost their
+predominance in the art of war, and with it their monopoly of the power
+of protection, both the reasons for their existence and their capacity
+to maintain it were undermined. They took to trade, or, at least, to
+money-making out of land, like ordinary citizens, and thus entered into
+a competition in which they had not the same assurance of success.
+
+Edward I's greatness consists mainly in his practical appreciation of
+these tendencies. He was less original, but more fortunate in his
+opportunity, than Henry II. The time had come to set limits to the
+encroachments of feudalism and of the church, and Edward was able to
+impose them because, unlike Henry II, he had the elements of a nation
+at his back. He was not able to sweep back these inroads, but he placed
+high-water marks along the frontiers of the state, and saw that they
+were not transgressed. He inquired into the titles by which the great
+lords held those portions of sovereign authority which they called
+their liberties; but he could take no further action when Earl Warenne
+produced a rusty sword as his effective title-deeds. He prohibited
+further subinfeudation by enacting that when an estate was sold, the
+purchaser should become the vassal of the vendor's lord and not of the
+vendor himself; and the social pyramid was thus rendered more stable,
+because its base was broadened instead of its height being increased.
+He expelled the Jews as aliens, in spite of their usefulness to the
+crown; he encouraged commerce by making profits from land liable to
+seizure for debt; and he defined the jurisdiction of the church, though
+he had to leave it authority over all matters relating to marriage,
+wills, perjury, tithes, offences against the clergy, and ecclesiastical
+buildings. He succeeded, however, in defiance of its opposition, in
+making church property liable to temporal taxation, and in passing a
+Mortmain Act which prohibited the giving of land to monasteries or
+other corporations without the royal licence.
+
+By thus increasing the national control over the church in England, he
+made the church itself more national. It is sometimes implied that the
+church was equally national throughout the Middle Ages; but it is
+difficult to speak of a national church before there was a nation, or
+to see that there was anything really English in a church ruled by
+Lanfranc or Anselm, when there was not an Englishman on the bishops'
+bench, when the vast majority of Englishmen were legally incapable as
+villeins of even taking orders in the church, and when the vernacular
+language had been ousted from its services. But with the English nation
+grew an English church; Grosseteste denounced the dominance of aliens
+in the church, while Simon de Montfort denounced it in the state. It
+was, however, by secular authority that the English church was
+differentiated from the church abroad. It was the barons and not the
+bishops who had resisted the assimilation of English to Roman canon
+law, and it was Edward I, and not Archbishops Peckham and Winchilsey,
+who defied Pope Boniface VIII. Archbishops, indeed, still placed their
+allegiance to the pope above that to their king.
+
+The same sense of national and insular solidarity which led Edward to
+defy the papacy also inspired his efforts to conquer Wales and
+Scotland. Indeed, it was the refusal of the church to pay taxes in the
+crisis of the Scottish war that provoked the quarrel with Boniface.
+But, while Edward was successful in Wales, he encountered in Scotland a
+growing national spirit not altogether unlike that upon which Edward
+himself relied in England. Nor was English patriotism sufficiently
+developed to counteract the sectional feelings which took advantage of
+the king's embarrassments. The king's necessity was his subjects'
+opportunity, and the Confirmation of Charters extorted from him in 1297
+stands, it is said, to the Great Charter of 1215 in the relation of
+substance to shadow, of achievement to promise. Edward, however, gave
+away much less than has often been imagined; he certainly did not
+abandon his right to tallage the towns, and the lustre of his motto,
+"Keep troth," is tarnished by his application to the pope for
+absolution from his promises. Still, he was a great king who served
+England well by his efforts to eliminate feudalism from the sphere of
+government, and by his insistence on the doctrine that what touches all
+should be approved by all. If to some catholic medievalists his reign
+seems a climax in the ascent of the English people, a climax to be
+followed by a prolonged recessional, it is because the national forces
+which he fostered were soon to make irreparable breaches in the
+superficial unity of Christendom.
+
+The miserable reign of his worthless successor, Edward II, illustrated
+the importance of the personal factor in the monarchy, and also showed
+how incapable the barons were of supplying the place of the feeblest
+king. Both parties failed because they took no account of the commons
+of England or of national interests. The leading baron, Thomas of
+Lancaster, was executed; Edward II was murdered; and his assassin,
+Mortimer, was put to death by Edward III, who grasped some of the
+significance of his grandfather's success and his father's failure. He
+felt the national impulse, but he twisted it to serve a selfish and
+dynastic end. It must not, however, be supposed that the Hundred Years'
+War originated in Edward's claim to the French throne; that claim was
+invented to provide a colourable pretext for French feudatories to
+fight their sovereign in a war which was due to other causes. There was
+Scotland, for instance, which France wished to save from Edward's
+clutches; there were the English possessions in Gascony and Guienne,
+from which the French king hoped to oust his rival; there were
+bickerings about the lordship of the Narrow Seas which England claimed
+under Edward II; and there was the wool-market in the Netherlands which
+England wanted to control. The French nation, in fact, was feeling its
+feet as well as the English; and a collision was only natural,
+especially in Guienne and Gascony. Henry II had been as natural a
+sovereign in France as in England, because he was quite as much a
+Frenchman as an Englishman. But since then the kings of England had
+grown English, and their dominion over soil which was growing French
+became more and more unnatural. The claim to the throne, however, gave
+the struggle a bitter and fruitless character; and the national means,
+which Edward employed to maintain the war, only delayed its inevitably
+futile end. It was supported by wealth derived from national commerce
+with Flanders and Gascony; national armies were raised by enlistment to
+replace the feudal levy; the national long-bow and not the feudal war-
+horse won the battles of Crecy and Poitiers; and command of the sea
+secured by a national navy enabled Edward to win the victory of Sluys
+and complete the reduction of Calais. War, moreover, required extra
+supplies in unprecedented amounts, and they took the form of national
+taxes, voted by the House of Commons, which supplemented and then
+supplanted the feudal aids as the mainstay of royal finance.
+
+Control of these supplies brought the House of Commons into
+constitutional prominence. It was no mere Third Estate after the
+continental model, for knights of the shire sat side by side with
+burgesses and citizens; and knights of the shire were the lesser
+barons, who, receiving no special writ of summons, cast in their lot
+with the Lower and not with the Upper House. Parliament had separated
+into two Houses in the reign of Edward II--for Edward I's Model
+Parliament had been a Single Chamber, though doubtless it voted by
+classes--but the House of Commons represented the _communities_ of
+the realm, and not its lower orders; or rather, it concentrated all
+these communities--shires, cities, and boroughs--and welded them into a
+single community of the realm. It thus created a nucleus for national
+feeling, which gradually cured the localism of early England and the
+sectionalism of feudal society; and it developed an _esprit de
+corps_ which counteracted the influence of the court. The advantages
+which the crown may have hoped to secure by bringing representatives up
+to Westminster, and thus detaching them from their basis of local
+resistance, were frustrated by the solidarity and consistency which
+grew up among members of parliament; and this growing national
+consciousness supplanted local consciousness as the safeguard of
+constitutional liberty.
+
+Most of the principles and expedients of representative government were
+adumbrated during this first flush of English nationalism, which has
+been called "the age of the Commons." The petitions, by which alone
+parliament had been able to express its grievances, were turned into
+bills which the crown had to answer, not evasively, but by a thinly
+veiled "yes" or "no." The granting of taxes was made conditional upon
+the redress of grievances; the crown finally lost its right to tallage;
+and its powers of independent taxation were restricted to the levying
+of the "ancient customs" upon dry goods and wines. If it required more
+than these and than the proceeds from the royal domains, royal
+jurisdiction, and diminishing feudal aids, it had to apply to
+parliament. The expense of the Hundred Years' War rendered such
+applications frequent; and they were used by the Commons to increase
+their constitutional power. Attempts were made with varying success to
+assert that the ministers of the crown, both local and national, were
+responsible to parliament, and that money-grants could only originate
+in the House of Commons, which might appropriate taxes to specific
+objects and audit accounts so as to see that the appropriation was
+carried out.
+
+The growth of national feeling led also to limitations of papal power.
+Early in Edward III's reign a claim was made that the king, in virtue
+of his anointing at coronation, could exercise spiritual jurisdiction,
+and the statutes of _Praemunire_ and _Provisors_ prohibited the
+exercise in England of the pope's powers of judicature and appointment
+to benefices without the royal licence, though royal connivance and
+popular acquiescence enabled the papacy to enjoy these privileges for
+nearly two centuries longer. National feeling was particularly inflamed
+against the papacy because the "Babylonish captivity" of the pope at
+Avignon made him appear an instrument in the hands of England's enemy,
+the king of France; and that captivity was followed by the "Great
+Schism," during which the quarrels of two, and then three, popes,
+simultaneously claiming to be the only head of the church on earth,
+undermined respect for their office. These circumstances combined with
+the wealth and corruption of the church to provoke the Lollard
+movement, which was the ecclesiastical aspect of the democratic
+tendencies of the age.
+
+One of the most striking illustrations of popular development was the
+demand for vernacular versions of the Scriptures, which Wycliffe met by
+his translation of the Bible. At the same time Langland made literature
+for the common people out of their common lot, a fact that can hardly
+be understood unless we remember that villeins, although they might be
+fined by their lords for so doing, were sending their sons in
+increasing numbers to schools, which were eventually thrown open to
+them by the Statute of Labourers in 1406. The fact that Chaucer wrote
+in English shows how the popular tongue was becoming the language of
+the court and educated classes. Town chronicles and the records of
+guilds and companies began to be written in English; legal proceedings
+are taken in the same tongue, though the law-reports continued to be
+written in French; and after a struggle between French and Latin, even
+the laws are drawn up in English. That the church persisted, naturally
+enough, in its usage of catholic Latin, tended to increase its
+alienation from popular sympathies. Wycliffe represented this national
+feeling when he appealed to national authority to reform a corrupt
+Catholic church, and when he finally denied that power of miraculous
+transubstantiation, upon which ultimately was based the claim of the
+priesthood to special privileges and estimation. But his association
+with the extreme forms of social agitation, which accompanied the
+Lollard movement, is less clear.
+
+Before the end of Edward III's reign the French war had produced a crop
+of disgrace, disorder, and discontent. Heavy taxation had not availed
+to retain the provinces ceded to England at the Treaty of Bretigny in
+1360, and hordes of disbanded soldiery exploited the social
+disorganization produced by the Black Death; a third of the population
+was swept away, and many villeins deserted their land to take up the
+more attractive labour provided in towns by growing crafts and
+manufactures. The lords tried by drastic measures to exact the services
+from villeins which there were not enough villeins to perform; and the
+imposition of a poll-tax was the signal for a comprehensive revolt of
+town artisans and agricultural labourers in 1381. Its failure did not
+long impede their emancipation, and the process of commuting services
+for rent seems to have gone on more rapidly in the first half of the
+fifteenth than in the fourteenth century. But the passionate preaching
+of social equality which inflamed the minds of the insurgents produced
+no further results; in their existing condition of political education,
+the peasant and artisan had perforce to be content with watching the
+struggles of higher classes for power.
+
+Richard II, who had succeeded his grandfather in 1377, reaped the
+whirlwind of Edward's sowing, not so much in the consequences of the
+war as in the fruits of his peerage policy. The fourteenth century
+which nationalized the Commons, isolated the Lords; and the baronage
+shrank into the peerage. The word "peer" is not of English origin, nor
+has it any real English meaning. Its etymological meaning of "equal"
+does not carry us very far; for a peer may be equal to anything. But
+the peers, consisting as they do of archbishops, dukes, marquises,
+earls, viscounts, bishops, and barons, of peers who are lords of
+parliament and of peers who are neither lords of parliament nor
+electors to the House of Commons, are not even equal to one another;
+and certainly they would deny that other people were equal to them. The
+use of the word in its modern sense was borrowed from France in the
+fourteenth century; but in France it had a meaning which it could not
+have in England. A peer in France claimed equality with the crown; that
+is to say, he was the ruler of one of the great fiefs which had been
+equal to the county of Paris when the count of Paris had been elected
+by his equals king of France. If the king of Wessex had been elected
+king of England by the other kings of the Heptarchy, and if those other
+kings had left successors, those successors might have claimed to be
+peers in a real sense. But they had no such pretensions; they were
+simply greater barons, who had been the tenants-at-will of their king.
+
+The barons, however, of William I or Henry II had been a large class of
+comparatively small men, while the peers of Richard II were a small
+class of big men. The mass of lesser barons had been separated from the
+greater barons, and had been merged in the landed gentry who were
+represented by the knights of the shire in the House of Commons. The
+greater barons were summoned by special and individual writs to the
+House of Lords; but there was nothing to fetter the crown in its issue
+of these writs. The fact that a great baron was summoned once, did not
+mean that he need be summoned again, and the summons of the father did
+not involve the summons of his eldest son and successor. But gradually
+the greater barons made this summons hereditary and robbed the crown of
+all discretion in the matter, though it was not till the reign of
+Charles I that the House of Lords decided in its own favour the
+question whether the crown had the power to refuse a writ of summons to
+a peer who had once received one.
+
+With this narrowing of the baronage, the barons lost the position they
+had held in the thirteenth century as leaders of constitutional reform,
+and this part was played in the fourteenth century by the knights of
+the shire. The greater barons devoted themselves rather to family than
+to national politics; and a system of breeding-in amalgamated many
+small houses into a few great ones. Thomas of Lancaster held five
+earldoms; he was the rival of Edward II, and might well be called a
+peer of the crown. Edward III, perceiving the menace of these great
+houses to the crown, tried to capture them in its interests by means of
+marriages between his sons and great heiresses. The Black Prince
+married the daughter of the Earl of Kent; Lionel became Earl of Ulster
+in the right of his wife; John of Gaunt married the heiress of
+Lancaster and became Duke of Lancaster; Thomas of Woodstock married the
+heiress of the Bohuns, Earls of Essex and of Hereford; the descendants
+of Edmund, Duke of York, absorbed the great rival house of Mortimer;
+and other great houses were brought within the royal family circle. New
+titles were imported from abroad to emphasize the new dignity of the
+greater barons. Hitherto there had been barons only, and a few earls
+whose dignity was an office; now by Edward III and Richard II there
+were added dukes, marquises, and viscounts, and England might boast of
+a peerage nearly, if not quite, as dangerous to the crown as that of
+France. For Edward's policy failed: instead of securing the great
+houses in the interests of the crown, it degraded the crown to the
+arena of peerage rivalries, and ultimately made it the prize of noble
+factions.
+
+Richard II was not the man to deal with these over-mighty subjects. He
+may perhaps be described as a "New" monarch born before his time. He
+had some of the notions which the Tudors subsequently developed with
+success; but he had none of their power and self-control, and he was
+faced from his accession by a band of insubordinate uncles. Moreover,
+it needed the Wars of the Roses finally to convince the country of the
+meaning of the independence of the peerage. Richard fell a victim to
+his own impatience and their turbulence. Henry IV came to the throne as
+the king of the peers, and hardly maintained his uneasy crown against
+their rival ambitions. The Commons, by constitutional reform, reduced
+almost to insignificance a sovereignty which the Lords could not
+overthrow by rebellion; and by insisting that the king should "live of
+his own," without taxing the country, deprived him of the means of
+orderly government. Their ideal constitution approached so nearly to
+anarchy that it is impossible not to suspect collusion between them and
+the Lords. The church alone could Henry placate by passing his statute
+for burning heretics.
+
+Henry V took refuge from this domestic imbroglio in a spirited foreign
+policy, and put forward a claim more hollow than Edward III's to the
+throne of France. There were temptations in the hopeless condition of
+French affairs which no one but a statesman could have resisted; Henry,
+a brilliant soldier and a bigoted churchman, was anything but a
+statesman; and the value of his churchmanship may be gauged from the
+fact that he assumed the insolence of a crusader against a nation more
+catholic than his own. He won a deplorably splendid victory at
+Agincourt, married the French king's daughter, and was crowned king of
+France. Then he died in 1422, leaving a son nine months old, with
+nothing but success in the impossible task of subduing France to save
+the Lancastrian dynasty from the nemesis of vaulting ambition abroad
+and problems shelved at home.
+
+Step by step the curse of war came home to roost. Henry V's abler but
+less brilliant brother, Bedford, stemmed till his death the rising tide
+of English faction and French patriotism. Then the expulsion of the
+English from France began, and a long tale of failure discredited the
+government. The nation had spirit enough to resent defeat, but not the
+means to avoid it; and strife between the peace party and the war party
+in the government resolved itself into a faction fight between
+Lancastrians and Yorkists. The consequent impotence of the government
+provoked a bastard feudal anarchy, maintained by hirelings instead of
+liegemen. Local factions fought with no respect for the law, which was
+administered, if at all, in the interests of one or other of the great
+factions at court; and these two great factions fostered and organized
+local parties till the strife between them grew into the Wars of the
+Roses.
+
+Those wars are perhaps the most puzzling episode in English history.
+The action of an organized government is comparatively easy to follow,
+but it is impossible to analyze the politics of anarchy. The Yorkist
+claim to the throne was not the cause of the war; it was, like Edward
+III's claim to the throne of France, merely a matter of tactics, and
+was only played as a trump card. No political, constitutional, or
+religious principle was at stake; and the more peaceable, organized
+parts of the community took little share in the struggle. No great
+battle was fought south of the Thames, and no town stood a siege. It
+looks as though the great military and feudal specialists, whose power
+lay principally on the Borders, were engaged in a final internecine
+struggle for the control of England, in somewhat the same way as the
+Ostmark or East Border of the Empire became Austria, and the Nordmark
+or North Border became Prussia, and in turn dominated Germany.
+Certainly the defeat of these forces was a victory for southern and
+eastern England, and for the commercial and maritime interests on which
+its growing wealth and prosperity hung; and the most important point in
+the wars was not the triumph of Edward IV over the Lancastrians in
+1461, but his triumph over Warwick, the kingmaker, ten years later. The
+New Monarchy has been plausibly dated from 1471; but Edward IV had not
+the political genius to work out in detailed administration the results
+of the victory which he owed to his military skill, and Richard III,
+who possessed the ability, made himself impossible as a king by the
+crimes he had to commit in order to reach the throne. The
+reconstruction of English government on a broader and firmer national
+basis was therefore left to Henry VII and the House of Tudor.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM
+
+1485-1603
+
+
+England had passed through the Middle Ages without giving any sign of
+the greatness which awaited its future development. Edward III and
+Henry V had won temporary renown in France, but English sovereigns had
+failed to subjugate the smaller countries of Scotland and Ireland,
+which were more immediately their concern. Wycliffe and Chaucer, with
+perhaps Roger Bacon, are the only English names of first importance in
+the realms of medieval thought and literature, unless we put Bede (673-
+735) in the Middle Ages; for insular genius does not seem to have
+flourished under ecumenical inspiration; and even Wycliffe and Chaucer
+may be claimed as products of the national rather than of the catholic
+spirit. But with the transition from medieval to modern history, the
+conditions were altered in England's favour. The geographical expansion
+of Europe made the outposts of the Old World the _entrepôts_ for
+the New; the development of navigation and sea-power changed the ocean
+from the limit into the link of empires; and the growth of industry and
+commerce revolutionized the social and financial foundations of power.
+National states were forming; the state which could best adapt itself
+to these changed and changing conditions would outdistance its rivals;
+and its capacity to adapt itself to them would largely depend on the
+strength and flexibility of its national organization. It was the
+achievement of the New Monarchy to fashion this organization, and to
+rescue the country from an anarchy which had already given other powers
+the start in the race and promised little success for England.
+
+Henry VII had to begin in a quiet, unostentatious way with very scanty
+materials. With a bad title and many pretenders, with an evil heritage
+of social disorder, he must have been sorely tempted to indulge in the
+heroics of Henry V. He followed a sounder business policy, and his
+reign is dull, because he gave peace and prosperity at home without
+fighting a battle abroad. His foreign policy was dictated by insular
+interests regardless of personal glory; and the security of his kingdom
+and the trade of his people were the aims of all his treaties with
+other powers. At home he carefully depressed the over-mighty subjects
+who had made the Wars of the Roses; he kept down their number with such
+success that he left behind him only one English duke and one English
+marquis; he limited their retainers, and restrained by means of the
+Star Chamber their habits of maintaining lawbreakers, packing juries,
+and intimidating judges. By a careful distribution of fines and
+benevolences he filled his exchequer without taxing the mass of his
+people; and by giving office to ecclesiastics and men of humble origin
+he both secured cheaper and more efficient administration, and
+established a check upon feudal influence. He was determined that no
+Englishman should build any castle walls over which the English king
+could not look, and that, as far as possible, no private person should
+possess a franchise in which the king's writ did not run. He left to
+his son, Henry VIII, a stable throne and a united kingdom.
+
+The first half of Henry VIII's reign left little mark on English
+history. Wolsey played a brilliant but essentially futile part on the
+diplomatic stage, where the rivalry and balance of forces between the
+Emperor Charles V and Francis I of France helped him to pose as the
+arbiter of Christendom. But he obtained no permanent national gains;
+and the final result of his foreign policy was to make the emperor
+master of the papacy at the moment when Henry wanted the pope to annul
+his marriage with the emperor's aunt, Catherine of Aragon. Henry
+desired a son to succeed him and to prevent the recurrence of dynastic
+wars; he had only a daughter, Mary, and no woman had yet ruled or
+reigned in England. The death of all his male children by Catherine
+convinced him that his marriage with his deceased brother Arthur's
+widow was invalid; and his passion for Anne Boleyn added zest to his
+suit for a divorce. The pope could not afford to quarrel with Charles
+V, who cared little, indeed, for the cause of his aunt, but much for
+his cousin Mary's claim to the English throne; and in 1529 Henry began
+the process, completed in the acts of Annates, Appeals, and Supremacy,
+by which England severed its connexion with Rome, and the king became
+head of an English church.
+
+It is irrational to pretend that so durable an achievement was due to
+so transient a cause as Henry's passion for Anne Boleyn or desire for a
+son; vaster, older, and more deeply seated forces were at work. In one
+sense the breach was simply the ecclesiastical consummation of the
+forces which had long been making for national independence, and the
+religious complement of the changes which had emancipated the English
+state, language, and literature from foreign control.
+
+The Catholic church naturally resisted its disintegration, and the
+severance was effected by the secular arms of parliament and the crown.
+The nationalism of the English church was the result rather than the
+cause of the breach with Rome, and its national characteristics--
+supreme governance by the king, the disappearance of cosmopolitan
+religious orders, the parliamentary authorization of services in the
+vernacular, of English books of Common Prayer, of English versions of
+the Bible, and of the Thirty-nine Articles--were all imposed by
+parliament after, and not adopted by the church before, the separation.
+There were, indeed, no legal means by which the church in England could
+have accomplished these things for itself; there were the convocations
+of Canterbury and York, but these were two subordinate provinces of the
+Catholic church; and, whatever may be said for provincial autonomy in
+the medieval church, the only marks of national autonomy were stamped
+upon it by the state. York was more independent of Canterbury than
+Canterbury was of Rome; and the unity as well as the independence of
+the national church depends upon the common subjection of both its
+provinces to the crown.  This predominance of state over church was a
+consequence of its nationalization; for where the boundaries of the two
+coincide, the state generally has the upper hand. The papacy was only
+made possible by the fall of the Western Empire; in the Eastern Empire
+the state, so long as it survived, controlled the church; and the
+independence of the medieval church was due to its catholicity, while
+the state at best was only national. It was in defence of the
+catholicity, as opposed to the nationalism, of the church that More and
+Fisher went to the scaffold in 1535, and nearly the whole bench of
+bishops was deprived in 1559. Henry VIII and Elizabeth were bent on
+destroying the medieval discord between the Catholic church and the
+national state. Catholicity had broken down in the state with the
+decline of the empire, and was fast breaking down in the church;
+nationalism had triumphed in the state, and was now to triumph in the
+church.
+
+In this respect the Reformation was the greatest achievement of the
+national state, which emerged from the struggle with no rival for its
+omnicompetent authority. Its despotism was the predominant
+characteristic of the century, for the national state successfully rid
+itself of the checks imposed, on the one hand by the Catholic church,
+and on the other by the feudal franchises. But the supremacy was not
+exclusively royal; parliament was the partner and accomplice of the
+crown. It was the weapon which the Tudors employed to pass Acts of
+Attainder against feudal magnates and Acts of Supremacy against the
+church; and men complained that despotic authority had merely been
+transferred from the pope to the king, and infallibility from the
+church to parliament. "Parliament," wrote an Elizabethan statesman,
+"establisheth forms of religion...."
+
+But while Englishmen on the whole were pretty well agreed that foreign
+jurisdiction was to be eliminated, and that Englishmen were to be
+organized in one body, secular and spiritual, which might be called
+indifferently a state-church or a church-state, there was much more
+difference of opinion with regard to its theological complexion. It
+might be Catholic or it might be Protestant in doctrine; and it was far
+more difficult to solve this religious problem than to effect the
+severance from Rome. There were, indeed, many currents in the stream,
+some of them cross-currents, some political, some religious, but all
+mingling imperceptibly with one another. The revolt of the nation
+against a foreign authority is the most easily distinguished of these
+tendencies; another is the revolt of the laity against the clerical
+specialist. The church, it must be remembered, was often regarded as
+consisting not of the whole body of the faithful, but simply of the
+clergy, who continued to claim a monopoly of its privileges after they
+had ceased to enjoy a monopoly of its intelligence and virtue. The
+Renaissance had been a new birth of secular learning, not a revival of
+clerical learning. Others besides the clergy could now read and write
+and understand; town chronicles took the place of monastic chronicles,
+secular poets of divines; and a middle class that was growing in wealth
+and intelligence grew also as impatient of clerical as it had done of
+military specialists. The essential feature of the reformed services
+was that they were compiled in the common tongue and not in the Latin
+of ecclesiastical experts, that a Book of _Common_ Prayer was used,
+that congregational psalm-singing replaced the sacerdotal solo,
+and a communion was substituted for a priestly miracle. Religious
+service was to be something rendered by the people themselves, and not
+performed for their benefit by the priest.
+
+Individual participation and private judgment in religion were indeed
+the essence of Protestantism, which was largely the religious aspect of
+the revolt of the individual against the collectivism of the Middle
+Ages. The control exercised by the church had, however, been less the
+expression of the general will than the discipline by authority of
+masses too illiterate to think for themselves. Attendance at public
+worship would necessarily be their only form of devotion. But the
+general emancipation of servile classes and spread of intelligence by
+the Renaissance had led to a demand for vernacular versions of the
+Scriptures and to a great deal of private and family religious
+exercise, without which there could have been no Protestant
+Reformation. Lollardy, which was a violent outburst of this domestic
+piety, was never completely suppressed; and it flamed out afresh when
+once political reasons, which had led the Lancastrians to support the
+church, induced the Tudors to attack it.
+
+Most spiritual of all the factors in the Reformation was the slow and
+partial emancipation of men's minds from the materialism of the Middle
+Ages. It may seem bold, in face of the vast secularization of church
+property and other things in the sixteenth century, to speak of
+emancipation from materialism. Nevertheless, there was a distinct step
+in the progress of men's minds from that primitive condition of
+intelligence in which they can only grasp material symbols of the real
+conception. Rudimentary jurisprudence had confessed its inability to
+penetrate men's thoughts and differentiate their actions according to
+their motives; there had been a time when possession had seemed more
+real than property, and when the transference of a right was
+incomprehensible without the transference of its concrete symbols.
+There could be no gift without its manual conveyance, no marriage
+without a ring, no king without a coronation. Many of these material
+swaddling-clothes remain and have their value. A national flag
+stimulates loyalty, gold lace helps the cause of discipline. Bishop
+Gardiner, in the sixteenth century, defended images on the ground that
+they were documents all could read, while few could read the
+Scriptures. To unimaginative men there could be no priest without
+vestments, no worship without ritual, no communion of the Spirit
+without the presence of the Body, no temple not made with hands, no God
+without an image. To break the image, to abolish the vestments and the
+ritual, to deny the transubstantiation, was to destroy the religion and
+reverence of the masses, who could only grasp matter and worship with
+their senses.
+
+Protestantism was, therefore, not a popular religion, and to thousands
+of educated men it did not appeal. Few people are so immaterialistic
+that they can dispense with symbols; many can idealize symbols in which
+others see nothing but matter; and only those devoid of artistic
+perception deny the religious value of sculpture, painting, and music.
+Protestantism might be an ideal religion if men were compounded of pure
+reason; being what they were, many adopted it because they were
+impervious to artistic influence or impatient of spiritual discipline.
+It will hardly do to divide the nation into intelligent Protestants and
+illiterate Catholics: the point is that the somewhat crude symbolism
+which had satisfied the cravings of the average man had ceased to be
+sufficient for his newer intelligent needs; he demanded either a higher
+symbolism or else as little as possible. Some felt the symbol a help,
+others felt it a hindrance to the realization of the ideal; so some men
+can see better with, others without, spectacles, but that fact would
+hardly justify their abolition.
+
+Henry VIII confined his sympathies to the revolt of the nation against
+Rome and the revolt of the laity against the priests. The former he
+used to make himself Supreme Head of the church, the latter to subdue
+convocation and despoil the monasteries. All civilized countries have
+found it expedient sooner or later to follow his example with regard to
+monastic wealth; and there can be little doubt that the withholding of
+so much land and so many men and women from productive purposes impeded
+the material prosperity of the nation. But the devotion of the proceeds
+to the foundation of private families, instead of to educational
+endowment, can only be explained and not excused by the exigencies of
+political tactics. His real services were political, not religious. He
+taught England a good deal of her insular confidence; he proclaimed the
+indivisible and indisputable sovereignty of the crown in parliament; he
+not only incorporated Wales and the county palatine of Chester with
+England, and began the English re-organization of Ireland, but he
+united England north with England south of the Humber, and consolidated
+the Borders, those frayed edges of the national state. He carried on
+the work of Henry II and Edward I, and by subduing rival jurisdictions
+stamped a final unity on the framework of the government.
+
+The advisers of Edward VI embarked on the more difficult task of making
+this organization Protestant; and the haste with which they, and
+especially Northumberland, pressed on the change provoked first
+rebellion in 1549 and then reaction under Mary. They were also
+confronted with social discontent arising out of the general
+substitution of competition for custom as the ruling economic
+principle. Capital amassed in trade was applied to land, which began to
+be treated as a source of money, not a source of men. Land held in
+severalty was found more profitable than land held in common, large
+estates than small holdings, and wool-growing than corn-growing. Small
+tenants were evicted, small holdings consolidated, commons enclosed,
+and arable land converted to pasture. The mass of the agricultural
+population became mere labourers without rights of property on the soil
+they tilled; thousands lost employment and swelled the ranks of sturdy
+beggars; and sporadic disorder came to a head in Kett's rebellion in
+Norfolk in 1549, which was with difficulty suppressed. But even this
+highhanded expropriation of peasants by their landlords stimulated
+national development. It created a vagrant mobile mass of labour, which
+helped to meet the demands of new industrial markets and to feed
+English oversea enterprise. A race that sticks like a limpet to the
+soil may be happy but cannot be great; and the ejection of English
+peasants from their homesteads saved them from the reproach of home-
+keeping youths that they have ever homely wits.
+
+Mary's reign, however, checked the national impulse towards expansion,
+and thrust England for the moment back into the Middle Ages. First she
+put herself and her kingdom under the aegis of Spain, to which in heart
+and mind she belonged, by marrying Philip II. Then with his assistance
+she restored the papal jurisdiction, and England surrendered its
+national independence. Those who repudiated their foreign jurisdiction
+were naturally treated as contumacious by the papal courts in England
+and sent to the stake; and English adventurers were prohibited, in the
+interests of Spain and Portugal, from trespassing in the New World.
+Finally England was plunged into war with France in order to help
+Philip, and lost Calais for its pains. Mary's reign showed that in a
+sovereign good intentions and upright conversation exaggerate rather
+than redeem the evil effects of bigotry and blindness. She had,
+however, made it impossible for any successor to perpetuate in England
+the Roman jurisdiction and the patronage of Spain.
+
+Elizabeth was a sovereign more purely British in blood than any other
+since the Norman Conquest; and to her appropriately fell the task of
+completing her country's national independence. Henry VIII's Act of
+Supremacy and Edward VI's of Uniformity were restored with some
+modifications, in spite of the opposition of the Catholic bishops, who
+contended that a nation had no right to deal independently with
+ecclesiastical matters, and suffered deprivation and imprisonment
+rather than recognize a schismatic national church. Elizabeth rejected
+Philip's offers of marriage and paid no heed to his counsels of state.
+She scandalized Catholic Europe by assisting the revolted Scots to
+expel the French from North Britain; and revenged the contempt, in
+which England had been held in Mary's reign, by supporting with
+impunity the Dutch against Philip II and the Huguenots against the king
+of France. She concealed her aggressions with diplomatic artifice and
+caution; but at heart she was with her people, who lost no opportunity,
+in their new-found confidence, of plundering and insulting the Catholic
+powers in their way.
+
+The astonishing success of England amid the novel conditions of
+national rivalry requires some attempt at explanation. It seems to have
+been due to the singular flexibility of the English character and
+national system, and to the consequent ease with which they adapted
+themselves to changing environment. Indeed, whatever may be the case at
+present, a survey of English history suggests that the conventional
+stolidity ascribed to John Bull was the least obvious of his
+characteristics; and even to-day the only people who never change their
+mind at general elections are the mercurial Celts. Certainly England
+has never suffered from that rigidity of social system which has
+hampered in the past the adaptability of its rivals. Even in feudal
+times there was little law about status; and when the customary
+arrangement of society in two agricultural classes of landlord and
+tenant was modified by commerce, capitalism, and competition, nobles
+adapted themselves to the change with some facility. They took to
+sheep-farming and commercial speculations, just as later on they took
+to keeping dairy-shops. It is the smallness rather than the source of
+his profits that excites social prejudice against the shopkeeper in
+England. On the Continent, however, class feeling prevented the
+governing classes from participating in the expansion of commerce.
+German barons, for instance, often with only a few florins a year
+income, could not supplement it by trade; all they could do was to rob
+the traders, robbery being a thoroughly genteel occupation. Hence
+foreign governments were, as a rule, less alive and less responsive to
+the commercial interests of their subjects. Philip II trampled on
+commercial opinion in a way no English sovereign could have done.
+Indeed, complaints were raised in England at the extent to which the
+commercial classes had the ear of parliament and the crown; since the
+accession of Henry VIII, it was said in 1559, they had succeeded by
+their secret influence in procuring the rejection of every bill they
+thought injurious to their interests.
+
+There was no feeling of caste to obstruct the efficiency of English
+administration. The nobility were separated from the nation by no fixed
+line; there never was in England a nobility of blood, for all the sons
+of a noble except the eldest were commoners. And while they were
+constantly sinking into the mass of the nation, commoners frequently
+rose to the rank of nobility. Before the end of the fourteenth century
+wealth derived from trade had become an avenue to the House of Lords.
+The justices of the peace, on whom the Tudors relied for local
+administration, were largely descended from successful city men who
+had, like the Walsinghams, planted themselves out in the country; and
+Elizabeth herself was great-great-granddaughter of a London mayor. This
+social elasticity enabled the government to avail itself of able men of
+all classes, and the efficiency of Tudor administration was mainly due
+to these recruits, whose genius would have been elsewhere neglected.
+Further, it provided the government with agents peculiarly fitted by
+training and knowledge to deal with the commercial problems which were
+beginning to fill so large a sphere in politics; and finally, it
+rendered the government singularly responsive to the public opinion of
+the classes upon whose welfare depended the expansion of England.
+
+Englishmen likewise took to the sea, when the sea became all-important,
+as readily as they took to trade. English command of the Narrow Seas
+had laid France open to the invasions of Edward III and Henry V, and
+had checked the tide of French reconquest before the walls of Calais.
+English piracy in the Channel was notorious in the fifteenth century,
+and in the sixteenth it attained patriotic proportions. Henry VII had
+encouraged Cabot's voyage to Newfoundland, but the papal partition of
+new-found lands between Spain and Portugal barred to England the door
+of legitimate, peaceful expansion; and there can be little doubt that
+this prohibition made many converts to Protestantism among English
+seafaring folk. Even Mary could not prevent her subjects from preying
+on Spanish and Portuguese commerce and colonies; and with Elizabeth's
+accession preying grew into a national pastime. Hawkins broke into
+Spanish monopoly in the West Indies, Drake burst into their Pacific
+preserves, and circumvented their defences; and a host of followers
+plundered nearly every Spanish and Portuguese colony.
+
+At last Philip was provoked into a naval war for which the English were
+and he was not prepared. Spanish rigidity embraced the Spanish marine
+as well as Spanish theology. Clinging to Mediterranean and medieval
+traditions, Spain had failed to realize the conditions of sea-power or
+naval tactics. England, on the other hand, had, largely under the
+inspiration of Henry VIII, adapted its navy to oceanic purposes. A type
+of vessel had been evolved capable of crossing the ocean, of
+manoeuvring and of fighting under sail; to Drake the ship had become
+the fighting unit, to the Duke of Medina Sidonia a ship was simply a
+vehicle for soldiers, and a sea-fight was simply a land-fight on sea.
+The crowning illustration of Spain's incapacity to adapt itself to new
+conditions is perhaps the fact that only a marquis or duke could be
+made a Spanish admiral.
+
+England had disposed of similar claims to political and military
+authority in 1569, when medieval feudalism made its last bid for the
+control of English policy. For ten years Elizabeth had been guided by
+Sir William Cecil, a typical "new man" of Tudor making, who hoped to
+wean the common people from dependence upon their lords, and to
+complete the destruction of feudal privileges which still impeded the
+action of national sovereignty. The flight of Mary Queen of Scots into
+England in 1568 provided a focus for noble discontent with Cecil's
+rule, and the northern earls rebelled in 1569. The rebellion was easily
+suppressed, but its failure did not deter the Duke of Norfolk, the
+earls' accomplice, from joining Ridolfi's plot with similar ends. He
+was brought to the block in 1572, and in him perished the last
+surviving English duke. For more than half a century England had to do
+its best--defeat the Spanish Armada, conquer Ireland, circumnavigate
+the globe, lay the foundations of empire, produce the literature of the
+Elizabethan age--without any ducal assistance. It was left for James I,
+who also created the rank of baronet in order to sell the title (1611),
+to revive the glories of ducal dignity in the persons of Ludovic
+Stuart, Duke of Richmond, and George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham
+(1623).
+
+Cecil's drastic methods of dealing with the opposition lords left the
+door of government open to men like Walsingham, who were determined to
+give full play to the new forces in English politics. Discontented
+reactionaries were reduced to impotent silence, or driven abroad to
+side openly with the enemy. Pius V's bull excommunicating and deposing
+Elizabeth (1570) shattered in a similar way the old Catholic party. The
+majority acquiesced in the national religion; the extremists fled to
+become conspirators at foreign courts or Jesuit and missionary priests.
+The antagonism between England and Spain in the New World did more,
+perhaps, than Spanish Catholicism to make Philip the natural patron of
+these exiles and of their plots against the English government; and as
+Spain and England drew apart, England and France drew together. In 1572
+a defensive alliance was formed between them, and there seemed a
+prospect of their co-operation to drive the Spaniards out of the
+Netherlands. But Catholic France resented this Huguenot policy, and the
+massacre of St. Bartholomew put a violent end to the scheme, while
+Elizabeth and Philip patched up a truce for some years. There could,
+however, be no permanent compromise, on the one hand, between Spanish
+exclusiveness and the determination of Englishmen to force open the
+door of the New World and, on the other, between English nationalism
+and the papal resolve to reconquer England for the Catholic church.
+Philip made common cause with the papacy and with its British champion,
+Mary Queen of Scots, while Englishmen made common cause with Philip's
+revolted subjects in the Netherlands. The acquisition of Portugal, its
+fleet, and its colonial empire by Philip in 1580, the assassination of
+William of Orange in 1584, and the victories of Alexander of Parma in
+the Netherlands forced Elizabeth into decisive action. The Dutch were
+taken under her wing, a national expedition led by Drake paralyzed
+Spanish dominion in the West Indies in 1585 and then destroyed Philip's
+fleet at Cadiz in 1587, and the Queen of Scots was executed.
+
+At last Philip attempted a tardy retaliation with the Spanish Armada.
+Its naval inefficiency was matched by political miscalculations. Philip
+never imagined that a united England could be conquered; but he
+laboured under the delusion, spread by English Catholic exiles, that
+the majority of the English people only awaited a signal to rise
+against their queen. When this delusion was exploded and the naval
+incompetence of Spain exposed, his dreams of conquest vanished, and he
+continued the war merely in the hope of securing guarantees against
+English interference in the New World, in the Netherlands, and in
+France, where he was helping the Catholic League to keep Henry of
+Navarre off the French throne. Ireland, however, was his most promising
+sphere of operations. There religious and racial hostility to the
+English was fusing discordant Irish septs into an Irish nation, and the
+appearance of a Spanish expedition was the signal for something like a
+national revolt. England had not been rich enough in men or money to
+give Ireland a really efficient government, but the extent of the
+danger in 1598-1602 stimulated an effort which resulted in the first
+real conquest of Ireland; and Englishmen set themselves to do the same
+work, with about the same amount of benevolence, for the Irish that the
+Normans had done for the Anglo-Saxons.
+
+So far Tudor monarchy had proved an adequate exponent of English
+nationalism, because nationalism had been concerned mainly with the
+external problems of defence against foreign powers and jurisdictions.
+But with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the urgency of those
+problems passed away; and during the last fifteen years of Elizabeth's
+reign national feelings found increasing expression in parliament and
+in popular literature. In all forms of literature, but especially in
+the Shakespearean drama, the keynote of the age was the evolution of a
+national spirit and technique, and their emancipation from the
+influence of classical and foreign models. In domestic politics a rift
+appeared between the monarchy and the nation. For one thing the
+alliance, forged by Henry VIII between the crown and parliament,
+against the church, was being changed into an alliance between the
+crown and church against the parliament, because parliament was
+beginning to give expression to democratic ideas of government in state
+and church which threatened the principle of personal rule common to
+monarchy and to episcopacy. "No Bishop, no King," was a shrewd aphorism
+of James I, which was in the making before he reached the throne. In
+other respects--such as monopolies, the power of the crown to levy
+indirect taxation without consent of parliament, to imprison subjects
+without cause shown, and to tamper with the privileges of the House of
+Commons--the royal prerogative was called in question. Popular
+acquiescence in strong personal monarchy was beginning to waver now
+that the need for it was disappearing with the growing security of
+national independence. People could afford the luxuries of liberty and
+party strife when their national existence was placed beyond the reach
+of danger; and a national demand for a greater share of self-
+government, which was to wreck the House of Stuart, was making itself
+heard before, on March 24, 1603, the last sovereign of the line which
+had made England a really national state passed away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT
+
+1603-1815
+
+
+National independence and popular self-government, although they were
+intimately associated as the two cardinal dogmas of nineteenth-century
+liberalism, are very different things; and the achievement of complete
+national independence under the Tudors did not in the least involve any
+solution of the question of popular self-government. Still, that
+achievement had been largely the work of the nation itself, and a
+nation which had braved the spiritual thunders of the papacy and the
+temporal arms of Philip II would not be naturally submissive under
+domestic tyranny. Perhaps the fact that James I was an alien hastened
+the admonition, which parliament addressed to him in the first session
+of the reign, to the effect that it was not prepared to tolerate in him
+many things which, on account of her age and sex, it had overlooked in
+Elizabeth.
+
+Parliament began the constitutional conflict thus foreshadowed with no
+clear constitutional theory; and its views only crystallized under
+pressure of James I's pretensions. James possessed an aptitude for
+political speculation, which was rendered all the more dangerous by the
+facilities he enjoyed for putting his theories into practice. He tried
+to reduce monarchy to a logical system, and to enforce that system as
+practical politics. He had succeeded to the English throne in spite of
+Henry VIII's will, which had been given the force of a parliamentary
+statute, and in spite of the common law which disabled an alien from
+inheriting English land. His only claim was by heredity, which had
+never been legally recognized to the exclusion of other principles of
+succession. James was not content to ascribe his accession to such
+mundane circumstances as the personal unfitness of his rivals and the
+obvious advantages of a union of the English and Scottish crowns; and
+he was led to attribute a supernatural virtue to the hereditary
+principle which had overcome obstacles so tremendous. Hence his theory
+of divine hereditary right. It must be distinguished from the divine
+right which the Tudors claimed; that was a right which was not
+necessarily hereditary, but might be varied by the God of battles, as
+at Bosworth. It must also be distinguished from the Catholic theory,
+which gave the church a voice in the election and deposition of kings.
+According to James's view, Providence had not merely ordained the king
+_de facto_, but had pre-ordained the kings that were to be, by
+selecting heredity as the principle by which the succession was to be
+determined for ever and ever. This ordinance, being divine, was beyond
+the power of man to alter. The fitness of the king to rule, the justice
+or efficiency of his government, were irrelevant details. Parliament
+could no more alter the succession, depose a sovereign, or limit his
+authority than it could amend the constitution of the universe. From
+this premiss James deduced a number of conclusions. Royal power was
+absolute; the king could do no wrong for which his subjects could call
+him to account; he was responsible to God but not to man--a doctrine
+which the Reformation had encouraged by proclaiming the Royal Supremacy
+over the church. He might, if he chose, make concessions to his people,
+and a wise sovereign like himself would respect the concessions of his
+predecessors. But parliamentary and popular privileges existed by royal
+grace; they could not be claimed as rights.
+
+This dogmatic assurance, to which the Tudors had never resorted,
+embittered parliamentary opposition and obscured the historical
+justification for many of James's claims. Historically, there was much
+more to be said for the contention that parliament existed by grace of
+the monarchy than for the counterclaim that the monarchy existed by
+grace of parliament; and for the plea that parliament only possessed
+such powers as the crown had granted, than for the counter-assertion
+that the crown only enjoyed such rights as parliament had conceded. Few
+of James's arbitrary acts could not be justified by precedent, and not
+a little of his unpopularity was due to his efforts to exact from local
+gentry the performance of duties which had been imposed upon them by
+earlier parliaments. The main cause of dissatisfaction was the growing
+popular conviction that constitutional weapons, used by the Tudors for
+national purposes, were now being used by the Stuarts in the interests
+of the monarchy against those of the nation; and as the breach widened,
+the more the Stuarts were led to rely on these weapons and on their
+theory of the divine right of kings, and the more parliament was driven
+to insist upon its privileges and upon an alternative theory to that of
+James I.
+
+This alternative theory was difficult to elaborate. There was no idea
+of democracy. Complete popular self-government is, indeed, impossible;
+for the mass of men cannot rule, and the actual administration must
+always be in the hands of a comparatively few experts. The problem was
+and is how to control them and where to limit their authority; and this
+is a question of degree. In 1603 no one claimed that ministers were
+responsible to any one but the king; administration was his exclusive
+function. It was, however, claimed that parliamentary sanction must be
+obtained for the general principles upon which the people were to be
+governed--that is to say, for legislation. The crown might appoint what
+bishops it pleased, but it could not repeal the Act of Uniformity; it
+might make war or peace, but could not impose direct and general
+taxation; it selected judges, but they could only condemn men to death
+or imprisonment for offences recognized by the law. The subject was not
+at the mercy of the king except when he placed himself outside the law.
+
+The disadvantage, however, of an unwritten constitution is that there
+are always a number of cases for which the law does not provide; and
+there were many more in the seventeenth century than there are to-day.
+These cases constituted the debatable land between the crown and
+parliament. Parliament assumed that the crown could neither diminish
+parliamentary privilege nor develop its own prerogative without
+parliamentary sanction; and it read this assumption back into history.
+Nothing was legal unless it had been sanctioned by parliament; unless
+the crown could vouch a parliamentary statute for its claims they were
+denounced as void. This theory would have disposed of much of the
+constitution, including the crown itself; even parliament had grown by
+precedent rather than by statute. There were, as always, precedents on
+both sides. The question was, which were the precedents of growth and
+which were those of decay? That could only be decided by the force of
+circumstances, and the control of parliament over the national purse
+was the decisive factor in the situation.
+
+The Stuarts, indeed, were held in a cleft stick. Their revenue was
+steadily decreasing because the direct taxes, instead of growing with
+the nation's income, had remained fixed amounts since the fourteenth
+century, and the real value of those amounts declined rapidly with the
+influx of precious metals from the New World. Yet the expense of
+government automatically and inevitably increased, and disputes over
+foreign policy, over the treatment of Roman Catholics, over episcopal
+jurisdiction, over parliamentary privileges, and a host of minor
+matters made the Commons more and more reluctant to fill the empty
+Treasury. The blunt truth is that people will not pay for what they do
+not consider their concern; and Stuart government grew less and less a
+popular affair. The more the Stuarts demanded, the greater the
+obstacles they encountered in securing compliance.
+
+James I levied additional customs which were called impositions, and
+the judges in 1606 properly decided that these were legal. But they
+increased James's unpopularity; and, as a precaution, parliament would
+only grant Charles I tonnage and poundage (the normal customs duties)
+for one year after his accession instead of for life. Charles contended
+that parliament had, owing to non-user, lost the right of refusing
+these supplies to the crown; he proceeded to levy them by his own
+authority, and further demanded a general forced loan and benevolence.
+For refusing to pay, five knights were sent to prison by order of the
+privy council "without cause shewn," whereby the crown avoided a
+judicial decision on the legality of the loan. This provoked the
+Petition of Right in 1628; but in 1629 Charles finally quarrelled with
+parliament over the question whether in assenting to the petition he
+had abandoned his right to levy tonnage and poundage. For eleven years
+he ruled without parliament, raising supplies by various obsolete
+expedients culminating in ship money, on behalf of which many patriotic
+arguments about the necessities of naval defence were used.
+
+He was brought up sharply when he began to kick against the
+Presbyterian pricks of Scotland; and the expenses of the Bishops' War
+put an end to the hand-to-mouth existence of his unparliamentary
+government in England. The Long parliament went to the root of the
+matter by demanding triennial sessions and the choice of ministers who
+had the confidence of parliament. It emphasized its insistence upon
+ministerial responsibility to parliament by executing Strafford and
+afterwards Laud. Charles, who laboured under the impression common to
+reactionaries that they are defending the rights of the people,
+contended that, in claiming an unfettered right to choose his own
+advisers, he was championing one of the most obvious liberties of the
+subject. Parliament, however, had realized that in politics principles
+consist of details as a pound consists of pence; and that if it wanted
+sound legislative principles, it must take care of the details of
+administration. Charles had ruled eleven years without parliament; but
+so had Wolsey, and Elizabeth had apologized when she called it together
+oftener than about once in five years. If the state had had more
+financial ballast, and the church had been less high and top-heavy,
+Charles might seemingly have weathered the storm and let parliament
+subside into impotence, as the Bourbons let the States-General of
+France, without any overt breach of the constitution. After all, the
+original design of the crown had been to get money out of parliament,
+and the main object of parliament had once been to make the king live
+of his own. A king content with parsimony might lawfully dispense with
+parliament; and the eleven years had shown the precarious basis of
+parliamentary institutions, given a thrifty king and an unambitious
+country. Events were demonstrating the truth of Hobbes's maxim that
+sovereignty is indivisible; peace could not be kept between a sovereign
+legislature and a sovereign executive; parliament must control the
+crown, or some day the eleven years would recur and become perpetual.
+In France, unparliamentary government was prolonged by the victory of
+the crown for a century and three-quarters. In England, Charles's was
+the last experiment, because parliament defeated the claim of the crown
+to rule by means of irresponsible ministers.
+
+In such a contest for the control of the executive there could be no
+final arbitrament save that of force; but Charles was only able to
+fight at all because parliament destroyed its own unanimity by
+attacking the church, and thus provided him with a party and an army.
+More than a temporary importance, however, attaches to the fact that
+the abeyance of monarchical power at once gave rise to permanent
+English parties; and it was natural that those parties should begin by
+fighting a civil war, for party is in the main an organ for the
+expression of combative instincts, and the metaphors of party warfare
+are still of a military character. Englishmen's combative instincts
+were formerly curbed by the crown; but since the decline of monarchy
+they have either been vented against other nations, or expressed in
+party conflicts. The instinct does not commonly require two forms of
+expression at once, and party strife subsides during a national war.
+Its methods of expression, too, have been slowly and partially
+civilized; and even a general election is more humane than a civil war.
+But the first attack of an epidemic is usually the most virulent, and
+party strife has not a second time attained the dimensions of civil
+war.
+
+One reason for this mitigation is that the questions at issue have been
+gradually narrowed down until, although they bulk large to heated
+imaginations, they really cover a very small area of political life,
+and the main lines continue the same whichever party triumphs. Another
+reason is that experience has proved the necessity of the submission of
+the minority to the majority. This is one of the greatest achievements
+of politics. In the thirteenth century Peter des Roches claimed
+exemption from the payment of a scutage on the ground that he had voted
+against it, and his claim was held to be valid. Such a contention means
+anarchy, and considerable progress had been made before the seventeenth
+century towards the constitutional doctrine that the vote of the
+majority binds the whole community. But the process was incomplete, and
+the causes of strife between Roundhead and Royalist were fundamental. A
+victory of the Royalists would have been carried to extremes, as the
+victory of the Roundheads was; and the result would almost certainly
+have been despotic government until a still more violent outbreak
+precipitated the country into a series of revolutions.
+
+Liberty, like religious toleration, has been won through the
+internecine warfare between various forms of despotism; and the
+strength of the Royalists lay in the fact that parliament, in espousing
+Presbyterianism, weighted its cause with an ecclesiastical system as
+narrow and tyrannical as Laud's. New presbyter was but old priest writ
+large, and the balance between the two gave the decision into the hands
+of the Independents, whose numerical inferiority was redeemed by
+Cromwell's military genius. When Presbyterians and Independents had
+ground the Royalists to powder at Marston Moor and Naseby, Charles
+sought to recover his authority through their quarrels. He fell between
+two stools. His double dealings with both parties led to the second
+civil war, to his own execution, and to the abolition of monarchy and
+of the House of Lords in 1649. Having crushed Catholic Ireland and
+Presbyterian Scotland, to which Charles and his son had in turn
+appealed, Cromwell was faced with the problem of governing England.
+
+The victorious party was in a hopeless minority, and some of the
+fervour with which the Independents appealed to divine election may
+have been due to a consciousness that they would not have passed the
+test of a popular vote. In their view, God had determined the
+fundamentals of the constitution by giving the victory to His elect;
+these fundamentals were to be enshrined in a written rigid
+constitution, and placed beyond the reach of parliament or the people.
+Under the sovereignty of this inspired constitution (1653), which
+provided, among other things, for the union of England, Ireland, and
+Scotland, a drastic reform of the franchise and redistribution of
+seats, the government was to be in the hands of a "single person," the
+Protector, and a single chamber, the House of Commons. The single
+person soon found the single chamber "horridly arbitrary," and
+preferred the freedom of military despotism. But his major-generals
+were even more arbitrary than the single chamber, and in 1657 a fresh
+constitution was elaborated with a Second Chamber to make it popular.
+The Restoration had, in fact, begun almost as soon as the war was over;
+the single chamber republic of 1649-1653 had given place to a single-
+chamber monarchy, called the Protectorate, and a further step was taken
+when in 1657 the "other" House was added; Cromwell was within an ace of
+making himself a king and his dynasty hereditary. Only his personal
+genius, the strength of his army, and the success of his foreign policy
+enabled him thus to restore the forms of the old constitution without
+the support of the social forces on which it had been based. His death
+in 1658 was necessarily followed by anarchy, and anarchy by the recall
+of Charles II.
+
+The Restoration was not so much a restoration of monarchy, which had
+really been achieved in 1653, as a restoration of the church, of
+parliament, and of the landed gentry; and each took its toll of profit
+from the situation. The church secured the most sectarian of its
+various settlements, and the narrowness of its re-establishment kept
+nearly half the nation outside its pale. The landed gentry obtained the
+predominant voice in parliament for a century and three-quarters, and,
+as a consequence, the abolition of its feudal services to the crown,
+the financial deficit being made up by an excise on beer instead of by
+a land-tax. Parliament emancipated itself from the dictation of the
+army, taking care never to run that risk again, and from the
+restrictions of a written, rigid constitution. It also recovered its
+rotten boroughs and antiquated franchise, but lost its union with the
+parliaments of Ireland and Scotland. At first it seemed more royalist
+than the king; but it soon appeared that its enthusiasm for the
+monarchy was more evanescent than its attachment to the church and
+landed interest. Even in the first flush it refrained from restoring
+the Star Chamber and the other prerogative courts and councils which
+had enabled the crown to dispense with parliamentary and common law
+control; and Charles II was never able to repeat his father's
+experiment of ruling for eleven years without a parliament.
+
+The ablest, least scrupulous, and most popular of the Stuarts, he began
+his reign with two objects: the emancipation of the crown from control
+as far as possible, and the emancipation of the Roman Catholics from
+their position of political inferiority; but the pursuit of both
+objects was strictly conditioned by a determination not to embark on
+his travels again. The two objects were really incompatible. Charles
+could only make himself autocratic with the support of the Anglican
+church, and the church was determined to tolerate no relaxation of the
+penal code against other Catholics. At first Charles had to submit to
+Clarendon and the church; but in 1667 he gladly replaced Clarendon by
+the Cabal administration, among the members of which the only bond of
+unity was that it did not contain a sound Anglican churchman. With its
+assistance he published his Declarations of Indulgence for Roman
+Catholics and Dissenters (1672), and sought to secure himself against
+parliamentary recalcitrance by a secret treaty with Louis XIV (1670).
+This policy failed against the stubborn opposition of the church. The
+Cabal fell; Danby, a replica of Clarendon, came into office; and the
+Test Act of 1673 made the position of the Roman Catholics worse than it
+was before the Declaration.
+
+This failure convinced Charles that one of his two designs must go by
+the board. He threw over the less popular cause of his co-religionists;
+and henceforth devoted himself to the task of emancipating the crown
+from parliamentary interference. But popular suspicion had been aroused
+by Charles's secret dealings and James's open professions; and Titus
+Oates, who knew something about real plans for the reconversion of
+England, inflated his knowledge into a monstrous tale of a popish plot.
+The Whigs, as the opposition party came to be called, used it for more
+than it was worth to damage the Tories under Danby. The panic produced
+one useful measure, the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, many judicial
+murders, and a foolish attempt to exclude James from the succession, As
+it subsided, Charles deftly turned the reaction to the ruin of the
+Whigs (1681). Of their leaders, Shaftesbury fled to Holland, and Sidney
+and Russell were brought to the block; their parliamentary strongholds
+in the cities and towns were packed with Tories; and for the last four
+years of his reign Charles ruled without a parliament, but with the
+goodwill of the Tories and the church.
+
+This half of the nation would probably have acquiesced in the growth of
+despotism under James II, had not the new king ostentatiously ignored
+the wisdom of Charles II. He began (1685) with everything in his
+favour: a Tory parliament, a discredited opposition, which further
+weakened its case by Argyll's and Monmouth's rebellions, and a great
+reputation for honesty. Within a couple of years he had thrown away all
+these advantages by his revival of Charles II's abandoned Roman
+Catholic policy, and had alienated the Anglican church, by whose
+support alone he could hope to rule as an English despot. He suspended
+and dispensed with laws, introduced Roman Catholics into the army, the
+universities, the privy council, raised a standing force of thirty
+thousand men, and finally prosecuted seven bishops for seditious libel.
+William III, the husband of James's daughter Mary, was invited by
+representatives of all parties to come over as England's deliverer, and
+James fled on his approach. He could not fight, like his father,
+because no English party supported his cause.
+
+The Revolution of 1688 was singularly negative so far as its results
+were expressed in the Bill of Rights and the Act of Settlement. These
+celebrated constitutional documents made little provision for national
+self-government. One king, it is true, had been evicted from the
+throne, and Roman Catholics were to be always excluded; and these
+measures disposed of divine hereditary right. But that had been a
+Stuart invention, and kings had been deposed before James II. Why
+should self-government follow on the events of 1688 any more than on
+those of 1399, 1461, or 1485? Future sovereigns were, indeed, to
+refrain from doing much that James had done. They were not to keep a
+standing army in time of peace, not to pardon ministers impeached by
+the House of Commons, not to dismiss judges except on an address from
+both Houses of Parliament, not to suspend laws at all nor to dispense
+with them in the way James had done, not to keep a parliament nor do
+without one longer than three years, and not to require excessive bail.
+Religious toleration, too, was secured in some measure, and freedom of
+the press to a limited extent. But all these enactments were safeguards
+against the abuse of royal power and infringement of civil liberty
+rather than provisions for self-government. No law was passed requiring
+the king to be guided by ministers enjoying the confidence of
+parliament; he was still the real and irresponsible executive, and
+parliament was limited to legislation. The favourite Whig toast of
+"civil and religious liberty" implied an Englishman's right to freedom
+from molestation, but not a right to a voice in the government of the
+country. Responsible self-government was not guaranteed by the laws,
+but it was ensured by the facts, of the Revolution.
+
+The truth is, that the methods of English constitutional progress have
+been, down to this day, offensive strategy and defensive tactics.
+Positions have been taken up which necessitate the retirement of the
+forces of reaction, unless they are prepared to make attacks
+predestined to defeat; and so, nearly every Liberal advance has been
+made to appear the result of Tory aggression. The central position has
+always been control of the purse by parliament. At first it only
+embraced certain forms of direct taxation; gradually it was extended
+and developed by careful spade-work until it covered every source of
+revenue. Entrenched behind these formidable earthworks, parliament
+proceeded to dictate to the early Stuarts the terms of national policy.
+Charles I, provoked by its assumptions, made his attack on the central
+position, was foiled, and in his retreat left large portions of the
+crown's equipment in the hands of parliament. Rasher attacks by James
+II resulted in a still more precipitate retreat and in the abandonment
+of more of the royal prerogatives. The growth of the empire and of the
+expenses of government riveted more firmly than ever the hold of
+parliament over the crown; the greater the demands which it alone could
+meet, the higher the conditions it could impose upon their grant, until
+parliament determined absolutely the terms upon which the office of
+monarchy should be held. In a similar way the Commons used their
+control of the national purse to restrict the powers of the House of
+Lords; provocation has led to attacks on the central position, and the
+failure of these attacks has been followed by surrender. Prudent
+leaders have preferred to retire without courting the preliminary of
+defeat.
+
+William III and his successors adopted this course when confronted with
+the impregnable position of parliament after the Revolution; and hence
+later constitutional gains, while no apparent part of the parliamentary
+position, were its inevitable consequences. William, absorbed in a
+life-and-death struggle with Louis XIV, required a constant stream of
+supplies from parliament; and to secure its regularity he had to rely
+on the good offices and advice of those who commanded most votes in the
+House of Commons. In the Lords, who then numbered less than two
+hundred, he could secure the balance of power through the appointment
+of bishops. In the Commons his situation was more difficult. The
+partial demise of personal monarchy in 1688 led to a scramble for its
+effects, and the scramble to the organization of the two principal
+competitors, the Whig and Tory parties. The Whigs formed a "junto," or
+caucus, and the Tories followed their example. William preferred the
+Whigs, because they sympathized with his wars; but the country
+sometimes preferred the Tories, because it hated William's Dutchmen and
+taxation. On William's death in 1702 the danger from Louis XIV was
+considered so acute that a ministry was formed from all parties in
+order to secure the united support of parliament; but gradually, in
+Anne's reign, the Tories who wanted to make peace left the ministry,
+until in 1708 it became purely Whig. In 1710 it fell, and the Tories
+took its place. They wanted a Stuart restoration, even at the price of
+undoing the Revolution, if only the Pretender would abandon his popery;
+while the Whigs were determined to maintain the Revolution even at the
+price of a Hanoverian dynasty. They returned to power in 1714 with the
+accession of George I, and monopolized office for more than half a
+century. As time went on, many Whigs became hardly distinguishable from
+Tories who had relinquished Jacobitism; and from Lord North's accession
+to office in 1770 down to 1830 the Tories enjoyed in their turn a half-
+century of nearly unbroken power.
+
+During this period the party system and cabinet government were
+elaborated. Party supplanted the crown as the determining factor in
+British government, and the cabinet became the executive committee of
+the party possessing a majority in the House of Commons. Queen Anne had
+not the intellect nor vigour to assert her independence of ministers,
+and George I, who understood no English, ceased to attend cabinet
+meetings. The royal veto disappeared, and even the king's choice of
+ministers was severely limited, not by law but by practical
+necessities. Ministers, instead of giving individual advice which the
+sovereign might reject, met together without the king and tendered
+collective advice, the rejection of which by the sovereign meant their
+resignation, and if parliament agreed with them, its dissolution or
+surrender on the part of the crown. For the purpose of tendering this
+advice and maintaining order in the cabinet, a chief was needed;
+Walpole, by eliminating all competitors during his long administration
+(1721-1742), developed the office of prime minister, which, without any
+law to establish it, became one of the most important of British
+institutions. Similarly the cabinet itself grew and was not created by
+any Act; indeed, while the cabinet and the prime minister were growing,
+it would have been impossible to induce any parliament to create them,
+for parliament was still jealous of royal influence, and even wanted to
+exclude from its ranks all servants of the crown. But, fortunately, the
+absence of a written constitution enabled the British constitution to
+grow and adapt itself to circumstances without legal enactment.
+
+The circumstance that the cabinet was the executive committee of the
+majority in the House of Commons gave it the command of the Lower
+House, and by means of the Commons' financial powers, of the crown.
+This party system was deplored by many; Bolingbroke, a Tory leader out
+of office, called for a national party, and urged the crown to
+emancipate itself from Whig domination by choosing ministers from all
+sections. Chatham thought that in the interests of national efficiency,
+the ablest ministers should be selected, whatever their political
+predilections. George III adapted these ideas to the purpose of making
+himself a king in deed. But his success in breaking down the party and
+cabinet system was partial and temporary; he only succeeded in humbling
+the Whig houses by giving himself a master in the person of the younger
+Pitt (1784), who was supported by the majority of the nation.
+
+With the House of Lords the cabinet has had more prolonged and
+complicated troubles. Ostensibly and constitutionally the disputes have
+been between the two Houses of Parliament; and this was really the case
+before the development of the close connexion between the cabinet and
+the Commons. Both Houses had profited by the overthrow of the crown in
+the seventeenth century, and the extremes to which they sometimes
+pushed their claims suggest that they were as anxious as the crown had
+been to place themselves above the law. The House of Lords did succeed
+in making its judicial decisions law in spite of the crown and Commons,
+although the Commons were part of the "High Court of Parliament," and
+no law had granted the Lords supreme appellate jurisdiction; hence the
+constitutional position of the House of Lords was made by its own
+decisions and not by Act of Parliament or of the crown. This claim to
+appellate jurisdiction, which was much disputed by the Commons during
+the reign of Charles II, was only conceded in return for a similar
+concession to the Commons in financial matters. Here the Commons
+practically made their resolutions law, though the Lords insisted that
+the privilege should not be abused by "tacking" extraneous provisions
+on to financial measures.
+
+There were some further disputes in the reigns of William III and Anne,
+but the only occasion upon which peers were actually made in order to
+carry a measure, was when the Tories created a dozen to pass the Peace
+of Utrecht in 1712. It is, indeed, a singular fact that no serious
+conflict between the two Houses occurred during the whole of the
+Georgian period from 1714 to 1830. The explanation seems to be that
+both Houses were simply the political agents of the same organized
+aristocracy. The humble townsfolk who figured in the parliaments of
+Edward I (see p. 65) disappeared when a seat in the House of Commons
+became a position of power and privilege; and to the first parliament
+(1547) for which journals of the Commons proved worth preserving, the
+eldest son of a peer thought it worth while seeking election. Many
+successors followed; towns were bribed or constrained to choose the
+nominees of peers and country magnates; burgage tenements were bought
+up by noble families to secure votes; and the Restoration parliament
+had material reasons for treating Cromwell's reforms as void, and
+restoring rotten boroughs and fancy franchises. By the time that
+parliament had emancipated itself from the control of the crown, it had
+also emancipated itself to a considerable extent from the control of
+the constituencies.
+
+This political system would not have developed nor lasted so long as it
+did, had it not had some virtue and some relevance to its environment.
+In every country's development there is a stage in which aristocracy is
+the best form of government. England had outgrown monarchical
+despotism, but it was not yet fit for democracy. Political power
+depends upon education, and it would have been unreasonable to expect
+intelligent votes from men who could not read or write, had small
+knowledge of politics, little practical training in local
+administration, and none of the will to exercise control. Politics were
+still the affair of the few, because only the few could comprehend
+them, or were conscious of the uses and limitations of political power.
+The corrupt and misguided use of their votes by those who possessed
+them was some reason for not extending the franchise to still more
+ignorant masses; and it was not entirely irrational to leave the
+control of national affairs in the hands of that section of the nation
+which had received some sort of political education.
+
+The defects, however, of a political system, which restricts power to a
+limited class or classes, are that each class tends to exercise it in
+its own interests and resents its extension to others, even when they
+are qualified for its use. If all other historical records had
+disappeared, land laws, game laws, inclosure acts, and corn laws--after
+the Revolution a bounty was actually placed on the export of corn,
+whereby the community was taxed in order to deprive itself of food or
+make it dearer--alone would prove that political power in the Georgian
+period was vested in a landed aristocracy, though England's commercial
+policy, especially towards Ireland, would show that mercantile
+interests had also to be consulted. Similarly, the journals of the
+House of Commons would prove it to have been a close corporation less
+anxious for the reign of law than for its own supremacy over the law.
+It claimed authority to decide by its own resolutions who had the right
+to vote for its members and who had the right to a seat. It expelled
+members duly elected, and declared candidates elected who had been duly
+rejected. It repudiated responsibility to public opinion as derogatory
+to its liberties and independence; it excluded strangers, and punished
+the publication of debates and division-lists as high misdemeanours. It
+was a law unto itself, and its notions of liberty sometimes sank to the
+level of those of a feudal baron.
+
+Hence the comparative ease and success with which George III filled its
+sacred precincts with his paid battalions of "king's friends." He would
+have been powerless against a really representative House; but he could
+buy boroughs and votes as effectively as Whig or Tory dukes, and it was
+his intervention that raised a doubt in the mind of the House whether
+it might not need some measure of reform. The influence of the crown,
+it resolved in 1780, had increased, was increasing, and ought to be
+diminished. But it could only be diminished by destroying that basis of
+corruption which supported the power of the oligarchs no less than that
+of the crown. Reform would be a self-denying ordinance, if not an act
+of political suicide, as well as a blow at George III. Privileged
+bodies do not reform themselves; proposals by Burke and by Pitt and by
+others were rejected one after another; and then the French Revolution
+came to stiffen the wavering ranks of reaction. Not till the Industrial
+Revolution had changed the face of England did the old political forces
+acknowledge their defeat and surrender their claim to govern the nation
+against its will.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND
+
+1603-1815
+
+
+In the reign of Elizabeth Englishmen had made themselves acquainted
+with the world. They had surveyed it from Greenland's icy mountains to
+India's coral strand, and from the Orinoco to Japan, where William
+Adams built the first Japanese navy; they had interfered in the
+politics of the Moluccas and had sold English woollens in Bokhara; they
+had sailed through the Golden Gate of California and up the Golden Horn
+of the Bosphorus; they had crossed the Pacific Ocean and the deserts of
+Central Asia; they had made their country known alike to the Great Turk
+and to the Grand Moghul. National unity and the fertile mingling of
+classes had generated this expansive energy, for the explorers included
+earls as well as humble mariners and traders; and all ranks, from the
+queen downwards, took shares in their "adventures." They had thus
+acquired a body of knowledge and experience which makes it misleading
+to speak of their blundering into empire. They soon learnt to
+concentrate their energies upon those quarters of the globe in which
+expansion was easiest and most profitable. The East India Company had
+received its charter in 1600, and the naval defeat of Spain had opened
+the sea to all men; but, with the doubtful exception of Newfoundland,
+England secured no permanent footing outside the British Isles until
+after the crowns of England and Scotland had been united.
+
+This personal union can hardly be called part of the expansion of
+England, but it had been prepared by some assimilation and cooperation
+between the two peoples, and it was followed by a great deal more. The
+plantation of Ulster by English and Scots after the flight of the Irish
+earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell in 1607 is one illustration, and Nova
+Scotia is another; but Virginia, the first colony of the empire, was a
+purely English enterprise, and it cradled the first-born child of the
+Mother of Parliaments. To Virginia men went for profit; principle drove
+them to New England. The Pilgrim Fathers, who sailed in the
+_Mayflower_ in 1620, had separated from the church and meant to
+separate from the state, and to set up a polity the antithesis of that
+of Laud and the Stuarts. But there was something in common between
+them; the Puritans, too, wanted uniformity, and believed in their right
+to compel all to think, or at least to worship, alike. Schism, however,
+appeals with ill grace and little success to authority; and
+dissentients from the dissenters formed Independent offshoots from New
+England. But all these Puritan communities in the north were different
+in character from Virginia in the south; they consisted of democratic
+townships, Virginia of plantations worked by slaves. Slave labour was
+also the economic basis of the colonies established on various West
+Indian islands during the first half of the seventeenth century; and
+this distinction between colonies used for exploitation and colonies
+used for settlement has led to important constitutional variations in
+the empire. Only those colonies in which large white communities are
+settled have received self-government; those in which a few whites
+exploit a large coloured population remain subject to the control of
+the home government. The same economic and social differences were
+responsible for the great American civil war between North and South in
+the nineteenth century.
+
+There are three periods in British colonial expansion. The first, or
+introductory period, was marked by England's rivalry with Spain and
+Portugal; the second by its rivalry with the Dutch; and the third by
+its rivalry with France; and in each the rivalry led to wars in which
+Britain was victorious. The Elizabethan war with Spain was followed by
+the Dutch wars of the Commonwealth and Charles II's reign, and then by
+the French wars, which lasted, with longer or shorter intervals, from
+1688 to 1815. The wars with the Dutch showed how completely, in the
+latter half of the seventeenth century, commercial interests outweighed
+those of religion and politics. Even when English and Dutch were both
+living under Protestant republics, they fought one another rather than
+the Catholic monarchies of France and Spain. Their antagonism arose
+over rival claims to sovereignty in the Narrow Seas, which the herring
+fisheries had made as valuable as gold mines, and out of competition
+for the world's carrying trade and for commerce in the East Indies. The
+last-named source of irritation had led to a "massacre" of Englishmen
+at Amboyna in 1623, after which the English abandoned the East Indian
+islands to the Dutch East India Company, concentrating their attention
+upon India, where the acquisition of settlements at Calcutta, Madras,
+and Bombay laid the foundations of the three great Presidencies of the
+British Empire in India.
+
+A fatal blow was struck at the Dutch carrying trade by the Navigation
+Acts of 1650-1651, which provided that all goods imported into England
+or any of its colonies must be brought either in English ships or in
+those of the producing country. The Dutch contested these Acts in a
+stubborn naval war. The great Admirals, Van Tromp and Blake, were not
+unevenly matched; but the Dutch failed to carry their point. The
+principle of the Navigation Acts was reaffirmed, with some
+modifications, after the Restoration, which made no difference to
+England's commercial and colonial policy. A second Dutch war
+accordingly broke out in 1664, and this time the Dutch, besides failing
+in their original design, lost the New Netherland colony they had
+established in North America. Portions of it became New York, so named
+after the future James II, who was Duke of York and Lord High Admiral,
+and other parts were colonized as Pennsylvania by the Quaker, William
+Penn. The great importance of this acquisition was that it drove out
+the wedge dividing the New England colonies to the north from Virginia
+and Maryland, which had been founded in Charles I's reign, mainly as a
+refuge for Roman Catholics, to the south; and this continuous line of
+British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard was soon continued
+southwards by the settlement of the two Carolinas. The colonization of
+Georgia, still further south, in the reign of George II, completed the
+thirteen colonies which became the original United States.
+
+France now overshadowed Holland as England's chief competitor. Canada,
+originally colonized by the French, had been conquered by the English
+in 1629, but speedily restored by Charles I; and towards the close of
+the seventeenth century France began to think of uniting Canada with
+another French colony, Louisiana, by a chain of posts along the
+Mississippi. Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, had greatly developed
+French commerce, navy, and navigation; and the Mississippi Company was
+an important factor in French history early in the eighteenth century.
+This design, if successful, would have neutralized the advantage
+England had secured in the possession of the Atlantic seaboard of North
+America, and have made the vast West a heritage of France.
+
+Nevertheless, the wars of William III and Anne were not in the main
+colonial. Louis' support of James II, and his recognition of the Old
+Pretender, were blows at the heart of the empire. Moderate success on
+James's part might have led to its dismemberment, to the separation of
+Catholic Ireland and the Scottish Highlands from the remainder of the
+British Isles; and dominion abroad would not long have survived
+disruption at home. The battle of the Boyne (1690) disposed of Irish
+independence, and the Act of Union with Scotland (1707) ensured Great
+Britain against the revival of separate sovereignties north and south
+of the Tweed. Scotland surrendered her independent parliament and
+administration: it received instead the protection of the Navigation
+laws, representation in both houses of the United Parliament, and the
+privilege of free trade with England and its colonies--which put an end
+to the tariff wars waged between the two countries in the seventeenth
+century; and it retained its established Presbyterian church. Forty-
+five Scottish members were to sit in the House of Commons, and sixteen
+Scottish peers elected by their fellows for each parliament in the
+House of Lords. Scottish peers who were not thus chosen could neither
+sit in the House of Lords nor seek election to the House of Commons.
+
+In time this union contributed materially to the expansive energy of
+the British Empire, but it did not substantially help Marlborough to
+win his brilliant victories in the war with France (1702-1713). Apart
+from the general defeat of Louis XIV's ambition to dominate Europe, the
+most important result, from the British point of view, was the definite
+establishment of Great Britain as a Mediterranean power by the
+acquisition of Gibraltar and Minorca. English expeditions against
+Canada had not been very successful, but the Peace of Utrecht (1713)
+finally secured for the empire the outworks of the Canadian citadel--
+Hudson's Bay Territories, Newfoundland, and the future provinces of
+Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. The trading privileges which Great
+Britain also secured in Spanish America both assisted the vast growth
+of British commerce under Walpole's pacific rule, and provoked the war
+with Spain in 1739 which helped to bring about his fall. This war,
+which soon merged in the war of the Austrian Succession (1741-1748),
+was indecisive in its colonial aspects, and left the question of French
+or English predominance in India and North America to be settled in the
+Seven Years' War of 1756-1763.
+
+War, however, decides little by itself, and three of the world's
+greatest soldiers, Alexander, Hannibal, and Napoleon, founded no
+permanent empires. An excellent servant, but a bad master, the soldier
+needs to be the instrument of other than military forces if his labours
+are to last; and the permanence of the results of the Seven Years' War
+is due less to the genius of Pitt, Wolfe, Clive, and Howe than to the
+causes which laid the foundations of their achievements. The future of
+North America was determined not so much by Wolfe's capture of Quebec--
+which had fallen into British hands before--as by the fact that before
+the Seven Years' War broke out there were a million and a quarter
+British colonists against some eighty thousand French. If Canada had
+not fallen in the Seven Years' War, it would have succumbed to British
+arms in the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The fate of
+India seemed less certain, and the genius of Dupleix roused better
+hopes for France; yet India, defenceless as it was against European
+forces, was bound to fall a prize to the masters of the sea, unless
+some European state could control its almost impassable overland
+approaches. Clive, perhaps, was almost as much the brilliant adventurer
+as Dupleix, but he was supported at need by an organized government
+more susceptible than the French _ancien régime_ to the pressure
+of commercial interests and of popular ambitions.
+
+The conquest of Canada led to the loss of the thirteen American
+colonies. Their original bias towards separation had never been
+eradicated, and the recurrent quarrels between the various legislatures
+and their governors had only been prevented from coming to a head by
+fear of the Frenchmen at their gates and disunion among themselves.
+Charles II and James II wanted to centralize the New England colonies
+on a monarchical basis; and they began by attacking their charters in
+much the same way as they dealt with the Puritan corporations of
+English cities and boroughs. Those of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and
+Rhode Island were forfeited, and these colonies were thus provided with
+a grievance common to themselves and to the mother-country. But, while
+the Revolution supplied a remedy at home, it did not in the colonies.
+Their charters, indeed, were restored; but when the Massachusetts
+legislature passed a bill similar to the Bill of Rights, the royal
+assent was not accorded, and the colonists remained liable to taxation
+without their own consent. This theoretical right of Great Britain to
+tax the American colonies was wisely left in abeyance until George
+Grenville's righteous soul was vexed with the thought that colonists,
+for whose benefit the Seven Years' War had largely been waged, should
+escape contribution towards its expenses. Walpole had reduced the
+duties on colonial produce and had winked at the systematic evasion of
+the Navigation Acts by the colonists. Grenville was incapable of such
+statesmanlike obliquity. He tried to stop smuggling; he asserted the
+right of the home government to control the vast hinterland from which
+the colonists thought that the French had been evicted for their
+particular benefit; and he passed the Stamp Act, levying internal
+taxation from the colonies without consulting their legislatures.
+
+Security from the French made the colonists think they were independent
+of the British, and, having an inordinate proportion of lawyers among
+them, they did not lack plausible arguments. They admitted the right of
+the British parliament to impose external taxes, such as customs
+duties, on the colonies, but denied its right to levy internal
+taxation. The distinction was well established in English
+constitutional history, and kings had long enjoyed powers over the
+customs which they had lost over direct taxation. But the English
+forefathers of the Puritan colonists had seen to it that control over
+direct, led to control over indirect, taxation; and it may be assumed
+that the American demand for the one would, if granted, soon have been
+followed by a demand for the other. In any case, reasons for separation
+would not have been long in forthcoming. It was not that the old
+colonial system was particularly harsh or oppressive; for the colonial
+producer, if restricted (nominally) to the home market, was well
+protected there. But the colonists wanted complete control over their
+own domestic affairs. It was a natural and a thoroughly British desire,
+the denial of which to-day would at once provoke the disruption of the
+empire; and there was no reason to expect colonial content with a
+government which was not giving much satisfaction in England. A
+peaceful solution was out of the question, because the governing
+classes, which steadily resisted English demands for reform, were not
+likely to concede American demands for radical innovations. There were
+no precedents for such a self-denying ordinance as the grant of
+colonial self-government, and law was on the side of George III. But
+things that are lawful are not always expedient, and legal
+justification is no proof of wisdom or statesmanship.
+
+The English people supported George III until he had failed; but there
+was not much enthusiasm for the war, except at places like Birmingham,
+which possessed a small-arms manufactory and other stimulants to
+patriotic fervour. It was badly mismanaged by George, and Whigs did
+their best to hamper his efforts, fearing, with some reason, that
+success in North America would encourage despotic enterprise at home.
+George would, however, in all probability have won but for the
+intervention of France and Spain (1778-1779), who hoped to wipe off the
+scores of the Seven Years' War, and for the armed neutrality of Russia
+and Holland (1780), who resented the arrogant claims of the British to
+right of search on the high seas. At the critical moment Britain lost
+the command of the sea; and although Rodney's naval victory (1782) and
+the successful defence of Gibraltar (1779-1783) enabled her to obtain
+tolerable terms from her European enemies, American independence had to
+be granted (1783). For Ireland was on the verge of revolt, and British
+dominion in India was shaken to its foundations. So the two great
+sections of the English people parted company, perhaps to their mutual
+profit. Certainly each government has now enough to do without solving
+the other's problems, and it is well-nigh impossible to conceive a
+state maintaining its equilibrium or its equanimity with two such
+partners as the British Empire and the United States struggling for
+predominance within it.
+
+Meanwhile, Warren Hastings saved the situation in India by means that
+were above the Oriental but below the normal English standard of
+morality. He was impeached for his pains later on by the Whigs, whose
+moral indignation was sharpened by resentment at the use of Anglo-
+Indian gold to defeat them at the general election of 1784. Ireland was
+placated by the grant of legislative independence (1782), a concession
+both too wide and too narrow to provide any real solution of her
+difficulties. It was too wide because Grattan's parliament, as it is
+called, was co-ordinate with, and not subordinate to, the imperial
+parliament; and there was thus no supreme authority to settle
+differences, which sooner or later were bound to arise between the two.
+It was too narrow, because the Irish executive remained responsible to
+Downing Street and not to the Irish parliament. The parliament,
+moreover, did not represent the Irish people; Catholics were excluded
+from it, and until 1793 were denied the vote; sixty seats were in the
+hands of three families, and a majority of the members were returned by
+pocket-boroughs. A more hopeless want of system can hardly be imagined:
+a corrupt aristocracy, a ferocious commonalty, a distracted government,
+a divided people--such was the verdict of a contemporary politician. At
+length, after a Protestant revolt in Ulster, a Catholic rising in the
+south, and a French invasion, Pitt bribed and cajoled the borough-
+mongers to consent to union with Great Britain (1800). Thirty-two Irish
+peers, twenty-eight temporal and four spiritual, were to sit in the
+House of Lords, and a hundred Irish members in the House of Commons.
+The realization of the prospect of Roman Catholic Emancipation, which
+had been held out as a further consideration, was postponed by the
+prejudices of George III until its saving grace had been lost.
+Grattan's prophecy of retribution for the destruction of Irish liberty
+has often been quoted: "We will avenge ourselves," he said, "by sending
+into the ranks of your parliament, and into the very heart of your
+constitution, one hundred of the greatest scoundrels in the kingdom";
+but it is generally forgotten that he had in mind the kind of members
+nominated by peers and borough-mongers to represent them in an
+unreformed House of Commons.
+
+The loss of the American colonies threw a shadow over British colonial
+enterprise which had some lasting effects on the colonial policy of the
+mother-country. The severance did not, as is often supposed, convince
+Great Britain that the grant of self-government to colonies was the
+only means to retain them. But they had been esteemed mainly as markets
+for British exports, and the discovery that British exports to America
+increased, instead of diminishing, after the grant of independence,
+raised doubts about the value of colonies which explain the comparative
+indifference of public opinion towards them during the next half-
+century. For the commercial conception of empire was still in the
+ascendant; and if the landed interest controlled the domestic politics
+of the eighteenth century, the commercial interest determined the
+outlines of British expansion. Territory was acquired or strongholds
+seized in order to provide markets and guard trade communications.
+
+From this point of view India became, after the loss of the American
+colonies, the dominant factor in British external policy. The monetary
+value of India to the British far exceeded that of all their other
+foreign possessions put together. The East India Company's servants
+often amassed huge fortunes in a few years, and the influence of this
+wealth upon British politics became very apparent in the last quarter
+of the century. It put up the price of parliamentary pocket-boroughs,
+and thus delayed reform; it enabled commercial men to force their way
+into the House of Lords by the side of landed magnates, and the younger
+Pitt doubled its numbers in his efforts to win the political support of
+the moneyed classes; and finally, it affected consciously or
+unconsciously men's views of the interests of the empire and of the
+policy to be pursued to serve them.
+
+The half-century which followed the American War of Independence was
+not, indeed, barren of results in other directions than those indicated
+by the East India Company. Canada was saved from the seductions of
+American independence by a wise recognition of its established customs
+and religion (1774), and was strengthened by the influx of United
+Empire Loyalists who would not bow the knee to republican separatism.
+Provision was made for the government of these some what discordant
+elements by dividing Canada into two provinces, one predominantly
+French, the other British, and giving each a legislature for the
+voicing of its grievances (1791). So, too, the impulse of the Seven
+Years' War survived the War of Independence in other quarters of the
+globe. Naval officers, released from war-like operations, were sent to
+explore the Pacific; and, among them, Captain James Cook surveyed the
+coasts of Australia and New Zealand (1770). The enthusiastic naturalist
+of the expedition, Joseph Banks, persistently sang the praises of
+Botany Bay; but the new acquisition was used as a convict settlement
+(1788), which was hardly a happy method of extending British
+civilization. The origin of Australia differed from that of New
+England, in that the Pilgrim Fathers wanted to avoid the mother-
+country; while the mother-country wanted to avoid the convicts; but in
+neither case was there any imperialism in the aversion.
+
+India was, in fact, the chief outlet at that period for British
+imperial sentiment. It is true that Great Britain laid down in solemn
+official language, in 1784, that the acquisition of territory was
+repugnant to the principles of British government. But so had Frederick
+the Great begun his career by writing a refutation of Machiavelli;
+circumstances, and something within which made for empire, proved too
+strong for liberal intentions, and the only British war waged between
+the Peace of Versailles in 1783 and the rupture with Revolutionary
+France in 1793 resulted in the dismemberment of Tippoo Sultan's kingdom
+of Mysore (1792). The crusading truculence of the French republicans,
+and Napoleon's ambition, made the security of the British Isles Pitt's
+first consideration; but when that was confirmed by naval victories
+over the French on the 1st of June, 1794, and at the battle of the Nile
+in 1798, over the Dutch at Camperdown and over the Spaniards at Cape
+St. Vincent in 1797, over the Danes at Copenhagen in 1801, and over the
+French and Spaniards combined at Trafalgar in 1805, Great Britain
+concentrated its energies mainly on extending its hold on India and the
+Far East, and on strengthening its communications with them. The
+purpose of the battle of the Nile was to evict Napoleon from Egypt,
+which he had occupied as a stepping-stone to India, and Malta was
+seized (1800) with a similar object. Mauritius, too, was taken (1810),
+because it had formed a profitable basis of operations for French
+privateers against the East India trade; and the Cape of Good Hope was
+conquered from the Dutch, the reluctant allies of the French, in 1795,
+as a better half-way house to India than St. Helena, which England had
+acquired from the same colonial rivals in 1673. The Cape was restored
+in 1802, but reconquered in 1806 and retained in 1815.
+
+In the Far East, British dominion was rapidly extended under the
+stimulus of the Marquess Wellesley, elder brother of the Duke of
+Wellington, who endeavoured in redundantly eloquent despatches to
+reconcile his deeds with the pacific tone of his instructions. Ceylon
+was taken from the Dutch in 1796, and was not restored like Java, which
+suffered a similar conquest; and British settlements were soon
+afterwards founded at Singapore and on the Malay Peninsula. In India
+itself Tippoo was defeated and slain in his capital at Seringapatam in
+1799, the Mahrattas were crushed at Assye and Argaum in 1803, the nabob
+was forced to surrender the Carnatic, and the vizier the province of
+Oudh, until the whole coast-line of India and the valley of the Ganges
+had passed directly or indirectly under British control. These regions
+were conquered partly because they were more attractive and accessible
+to the British, and partly to prevent their being accessible to the
+French; the poorer and more difficult mountainous districts of the
+Deccan, isolated from foreign infection, were left under native rulers.
+
+The final overthrow of Napoleon, to which Great Britain had contributed
+more by its efforts in the Spanish Peninsular War (1808-1814) than at
+the crowning mercy of Waterloo, confirmed its conquests in India and
+its control of the trade routes of the world. Its one permanent failure
+during the war was Whitelocke's expedition to Buenos Ayres in 1807;
+that attack was not repeated because the Spaniards having, by their
+revolt against Napoleon, become England's allies, it was hardly fair to
+appropriate their colonies; and so South America was left to work out
+its destinies under Latin and not Teutonic influence. Most of the West
+Indian islands, however, with British Honduras and British Guiana on
+the mainland, had been acquired for the empire, which had now secured
+footholds in all the continents of the world. The development of those
+footholds into great self-governing communities, the unique and real
+achievement of the British Empire, was the work of the nineteenth
+century; and its accomplishment depended upon the effects of the
+changes known to us as the Industrial Revolution.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
+
+
+The Industrial Revolution is a phrase invented by Arnold Toynbee, and
+now generally used to indicate those economic changes which turned
+England from an agricultural into an industrial community. The period
+during which these changes took place cannot from the nature of things
+be definitely fixed; but usually it is taken to extend from about the
+middle of the eighteenth century to the close of the reign of George
+III. Two points, however, must be remembered: first, that there was a
+commercial as well as an agricultural and an industrial stage of
+development; and secondly, that this period contains merely the central
+and crucial years of a process of specialization and expansion which
+occupied centuries of English economic history. There was also before
+the agricultural stage a pastoral stage; but that lies beyond the scope
+of English history, because both the English people and the Celts they
+conquered had passed out of the pastoral stage before recorded English
+history begins. Each of these stages corresponds to a different social
+organization: the pastoral stage was patriarchal, the agricultural
+stage was feudal, the commercial stage was plutocratic, and the
+industrial stage leads towards democracy. The stages, of course,
+overlap one another, and every national community to-day is partly
+pastoral, partly agricultural, partly commercial, and partly
+industrial. We can only call a nation any one of these things in the
+sense that they denote its dominant characteristic.
+
+This evolution has been the result of man's increasing control over
+nature. In the pastoral stage he takes of the produce of nature,
+providing little or nothing himself. In the agricultural stage he
+manipulates the soil and subdues it, he harnesses the wind and the
+streams to grind his corn, and to water his land; Providence may have
+placed all things under his feet, but he takes long to discover their
+use and the means to use them. In the commercial and industrial stages
+he employs the wind and water, steam and electricity, for transport,
+communications, and manufactures. But he can only develop this mastery
+by the interdependent processes of specialization, co-operation, and
+expansion. A lonely shepherd can live on his flocks without help; a
+single family can provide for its own agricultural subsistence, and the
+normal holding of the primitive English family, the "hide" as it was
+called, was really a share in all the means of livelihood, corn-land,
+pasture-land, rights of common and of cutting wood. This family
+independence long survived, and home-brewing, home-baking, home-
+washing, are not even now extinct. Each family in the primitive village
+did everything for itself. When its needs and standard of comfort grew,
+increased facilities beyond the reach of the individual household were
+provided by the lord of the manor, as, for instance, a mill, a
+bakehouse, a wine-press. Indeed, the possession of these things may
+have helped him into the lordship of the manor. Certainly, some of them
+are mentioned in early Anglo-Saxon days among the qualifications for
+thegnhood, and when the lord possessed these things, he claimed a
+monopoly; his tenants were bound to grind their corn at his mill, and
+so forth. But there were things he did not care to do, and a villager
+here and there began to specialize in such trades as the blacksmith's,
+carpenter's, and mason's. This specialization involved co-operation and
+the expansion of household economy into village economy. Others must do
+the blacksmith's sowing and reaping, while he did the shoeing for the
+whole village.
+
+Thus village industries grew up, and in unprogressive countries, such
+as India, where, owing to distance and lack of communications, villages
+were isolated and self-sufficing, this village economy became
+stereotyped, and the village trades hereditary. But in western Europe,
+as order was slowly evolved after the chaos of the Dark Ages,
+communications and trade-routes were opened up; and whole villages
+began to specialize in certain industries, leaving other commodities to
+be produced by other communities. For the exchange of these commodities
+markets and fairs were established at various convenient centres; and
+this in turn led to the specialization of traders and merchants, who
+did not make, but only arranged for the barter of, manufactures.
+Through the development of local industries and markets, villages grew
+into towns, and towns expanded with the extent of the area they
+supplied. A town which supplied a nation with cutlery, for instance,
+was necessarily bigger than a town which only supplied a county. This
+expansion of markets meant that towns and cities were more and more
+specializing in some one or more industries, leaving the great majority
+of their needs to be supplied from elsewhere; and the whole process was
+based on the growing complexity of civilization, on the multiplying
+number of implements required to do the work of the world.
+
+The comparatively simple organization of feudal society broke down
+under the stress of these changes; a middle class, consisting of
+neither lords nor villeins, was needed to cope with industry and
+commerce. Handworkers also were required, so that from the middle of
+the fourteenth century we find a regular flight from the land to the
+towns in progress. Another great change took place. No one had been
+rich according to modern notions in the early Middle Ages, and no one
+had been destitute; there was no need of a Poor Law. But with the
+expansion of the sphere of men's operations, the differences between
+the poor and the rich began to increase. There is little to choose
+between a slow runner and a swift when the race covers only ten yards;
+there is more when it covers a hundred, and a great deal when it covers
+a mile. So, too, when operations are limited to the village market,
+ability has a limited scope, and the able financier does not grow so
+very much richer than his neighbour. But when his market comprises a
+nation, his means for acquiring wealth are extended; the rich become
+richer, and the poor, comparatively at any rate, poorer. Hence, when in
+the fourteenth and following centuries the national market expands into
+a world market, we find growing up side by side capitalism and
+destitution; and the reason why there are so many millionaires and so
+much destitution to-day, compared with earlier times, is that the world
+is now one market, and the range of operations is only limited by the
+globe.
+
+The control of the world's supplies tends to get into the hands of a
+few big producers or operators instead of being in the hands of a vast
+number of small ones; and this has come about through ever-expanding
+markets and ever-increasing specialization. Even whole nations
+specialize more or less; some produce the corn-supply of the world,
+some its coal, some its oil, and some do its carrying trade. It is now
+a question whether there should not be some limits to this process, and
+it is asked whether a nation or empire should not be self-supporting,
+irrespective of the economic advantages of expansion and
+specialization, and of the fact that the more self-supporting it is,
+the less trade can it do with others; for it cannot export unless it
+imports, and if each nation makes everything it wants itself it will
+neither sell to, nor buy from, other nations.
+
+There have been two periods in English history during which these
+general tendencies have been especially marked. One was at the close of
+the Middle Ages, and the other during the reign of George III. The
+break-up of the manorial system, the growth of a body of mobile labour,
+and of capital seeking investment, the discovery of new worlds and new
+markets, heralded the advent of the middle class and of the commercial
+age. Custom, which had regulated most things in the Middle Ages, gave
+way to competition, which defied all regulation; and England became a
+nation of privateers, despoiling the church, Spain, Ireland, and often
+the commonwealth itself. Scores of acts against fraudulent
+manufacturers and against inclosures were passed in vain, because they
+ran counter to economic conditions. The products of the new factories,
+like Jack of Newbury's kerseys, could not equal in quality the older
+home-made article, because the home-made article was produced under
+non-economic conditions. Spinsters today knit better garments than
+those turned out in bulk, because neither time nor money is any
+consideration with them; they knit for occupation, not for a living,
+and they can afford to devote more labour to their produce than they
+could possibly do if they depended upon it for subsistence. The case
+was the same with the home-products of earlier times, and compared with
+them the newer factory-product was shoddy; because, if the manufacturer
+was to earn a living from his industry he must produce a certain
+quantity within a limited time. These by-products of the home were
+enabled to hold their own against the factory products until the
+development of machinery in the eighteenth century; and until that time
+the factory system, although factories existed on a rudimentary scale,
+did not fully develop. So far as it did develop, it meant an increase
+in the efficiency and in the total wealth of the nation, but a decrease
+in the prosperity of thousands of individual households.
+
+The effect of inclosures was very similar. The old system of the
+villagers cultivating in turn strips of land in open fields was
+undoubtedly unsound, if the amount of wealth produced is the sole
+criterion; but it produced enough for the individual village-community,
+and the increased production accruing from inclosures went to swell the
+total wealth of the nation and of those who manipulated it at the cost
+of the tillers of the soil. The cost to the community was potential
+rather than actual; common lands which are now worth millions were
+appropriated by landlords in defiance of the law. This illegality was
+remedied in 1549, not by stopping the inclosures but by making them
+legal, provided that "sufficient" commons were left; if the incloser
+considered his leavings enough, the gainsaying of the tenants was to be
+ignored, or punished as treason or felony in case of persistence.
+England, however, was still fairly big for its three or four millions
+of souls, and an Act of Queen Elizabeth provided that every new cottage
+built should stand in four acres of its own. This anticipation of the
+demand for three acres and a cow did something to check excessive
+specialization; for the tenants of these cottages added a little
+cultivation on their own account to their occupations as hired
+labourers or village artisans. In the seventeenth century the land-
+hunger of the landlords was generally sated by schemes for draining and
+embanking; and vast tracts of fen and marsh, such as Hatfield Chase and
+Bedford Level, were thus brought under cultivation.
+
+Commerce rather than industrialism or agriculture is the distinctive
+feature of English economy during the seventeenth and first half of the
+eighteenth century. By means of newly developed trade-routes, the East
+and the West were tapped for such products as tobacco, tea, coffee,
+cocoa, sugar, rum, spices, oranges, lemons, raisins, currants, silks,
+cotton, rice, and others with which England had previously somehow or
+other dispensed; and the principal bone of contention was the carrying
+trade of the world. Shipbuilding was the most famous English industry;
+and when Peter the Great visited England, he spent most of his time in
+the Deptford yards. For some of these imports England paid by her
+services as carrier; and so far as India was concerned it was a case of
+robbery rather than exchange. But exports were more and more required
+to pay for the ever-increasing imports. It is impossible to state
+categorically either that the imports provoked the exports or the
+exports the imports; for the supply creates the demand as much as the
+demand creates the supply. There can have been no conscious demand for
+tobacco in England before any Englishman had smoked a pipe; and when an
+English merchant in Elizabeth's reign took a thousand kerseys to
+Bokhara, he did so without waiting for an order. Both exports and
+imports, however, can only develop together; the dimensions to which
+English commerce had attained by Walpole's time involved exports as
+well as imports; and the exports could not have been provided without
+developing English industries.
+
+In particular, England had to export to the colonies because the
+colonies had by the Navigation Acts to export to England; and Walpole's
+abolition or reduction of duties on colonial produce illustrated and
+encouraged the growth of this trade. In return for colonial tobacco,
+rice, cotton, sugar, England sent chiefly woollen and afterwards cotton
+manufactures. These woollens had long been manufactured on the domestic
+system in the sheep-rearing districts of England, particularly
+Yorkshire; many a cottage with its four acres for farming had also its
+spinning-wheel, and many a village its loom; and the cloth when
+finished was conveyed by pack-horses or waggons to the markets and
+fairs to be sold for export or home consumption. But between 1764 and
+1779 a series of inventions by Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton,
+transformed the simple spinning-wheel into an elaborate machine capable
+of doing the work of many spinners; and once more an advance in
+national productivity was made at the expense of the individual workers
+who took to breaking the machines to stop their loss of work.
+
+Similar changes followed in cotton-spinning and other industries, and
+the result was to alter the whole economic structure of England. The
+cottager could not afford the new and expensive machinery, and his
+spinning-wheels and hand-looms were hopelessly beaten in the
+competition. Huge factories were required for the new inventions, where
+the workers were all huddled together instead of working in their
+scattered homes; and large populations grew up around these new and
+artificial manufacturing centres. Their locality was, however,
+determined by natural causes; at first water-power was the best
+available force to drive the new machines, and consequently towns
+sprang up along the banks of rivers. But Watt's application of steam-
+power to machinery soon supplanted water; and for steam-power coal and
+iron were the greatest necessities. Factories therefore tended to
+congregate where coal and iron were found; and the need for these
+materials created the coal and iron industries. Moreover, the pack-
+horse, the waggon, and the old unmetalled roads soon proved inadequate
+for the new requirements of transport. For a time canals became the
+favourite substitute, and many were constructed. Then Macadam invented
+his method of making roads; finally, Stephenson developed the steam
+locomotive, and the railway system came into existence.
+
+Closely connected with these changes was a renewal of the inclosure
+movement. The introduction of turnips and other roots, and the
+development of the rotation of crops increased the value of the soil
+and revived the stimulus to inclosure; and hundreds of inclosure acts
+were hurriedly passed by a parliament which contained no
+representatives of those who suffered from the process. It was assisted
+by the further specialization consequent upon the industrial
+revolution; while the agricultural labourer gave up spinning under the
+stress of factory competition, the spinner deserted his cottage and
+four acres in the country, to seek a dwelling near the factory which
+employed him; and the Elizabethan Act, insisting upon the allocation of
+four acres to each new cottage built, was repealed. But for that
+repeal, factory slums would be garden cities, unless the incubus of
+this provision had stopped the factory development. The final result of
+the inclosure movement upon the country was to deprive the public of
+most of its commons and open spaces, to deprive the agricultural
+labourer of all right in the soil he tilled, and to rob him of that
+magic of property which, in Arthur Young's phrase, turned sand into
+gold.
+
+The inevitable adjustment of the population to these altered economic
+conditions entirely changed its distribution. Hitherto the progressive
+and predominant parts of England had been the south and east;
+conservatism found its refuge in the north and west, which rebelled
+against the Tudors and fought for Charles I. The south and east had
+been the manufacturing centres because iron was smelted with wood and
+not with coal. Now that coal was substituted for wood, the
+juxtaposition of coal and iron mines in the north attracted thither the
+industries of the nation, while the special features of its climate
+made South Lancashire the home of cotton-spinning. The balance of
+population and political power followed. To-day southern England, apart
+from London and some other ports, hardly does more than subsist, and
+its occupations are largely parasitic. The work and the wealth and the
+trade which support the empire and its burdens have their origin and
+being in the north.
+
+The population not only shifted, but rapidly increased. The uprooting
+of peasants from their little plots of land which acted in medieval
+England and acts to-day in France as a check upon breeding, and their
+herding in crowded tenements, weakened both moral and prudential
+restraints in the towns; while in the country the well-meant but ill-
+considered action of the justices of the peace in supplementing the
+beggarly wages of the labourers by grants out of the rates proportioned
+to the number of each man's children produced a similar effect. The
+result was an increase in the population welcome to patriots who hoped
+for hordes of soldiers and sailors to fight Napoleon, but startling to
+economists like Malthus, who inferred therefrom a natural law
+constraining population to outrun the earth's increase. Malthus did not
+foresee the needs of the empire, nor realize that the rapid growth in
+the population of his day was largely due to the absence from the
+proletariate of a standard of comfort and decency. Without the
+Industrial Revolution Great Britain would not have been able to people
+the lands she had marked for her own.
+
+This increase and shifting of the people put the finishing touch to the
+incongruities of the old political system, in which vast centres of
+population teeming with life and throbbing with industry were
+unrepresented, while members sat in parliament for boroughs so decayed
+that nothing was left of them but a green mound, a park, or a ruined
+wall. The struggle with the French Revolution and then with Napoleon
+gave the vested interests a respite from their doom; and for seventeen
+years after its close the Tories sat, clothed in the departing glories
+of the war, upon the safety-valve of constitutional reform. Then in
+1832, after one general election fought on this issue, and after
+further resistance by the House of Lords on behalf of the liberties of
+borough-proprietors and faggot-voters, the threat to create peers
+induced a number to abstain sufficient to ensure the passing of the
+first Reform Bill. It was a moderate measure to have brought the
+country to the verge of political revolution; roughly, it disfranchised
+a number of poor voters, but enfranchised the mass of the middle and
+lower middle-class. Absolutely rotten boroughs were abolished, but a
+large number of very small ones were retained, and the representation
+of the new towns was somewhat grudging and restricted. A more drastic
+measure, giving the vote to most of the town artisans was--being
+introduced by a Tory minister, Disraeli, in 1867--passed by the House
+of Lords without difficulty. The last alteration of the franchise,
+giving the vote to agricultural labourers was--being introduced by
+Gladstone in 1884--only passed by the House of Lords at the second time
+of asking and after an agitation.
+
+Political emancipation was but one of the results of the Industrial
+Revolution; commercial expansion was another. England had now
+definitely and decisively specialized in certain industries; she could
+only do so by relying upon external sources for her supply of other
+wants. The more her new industries gave her to export, the more she
+required to import from customers upon whose wealth her own prosperity
+depended. In particular, England became dependent upon foreign
+producers for her food supplies. During the war the foreign supply of
+corn was so hampered that it was as dear to import as to grow at home;
+but after the peace the price began to fall, and the farmers and
+landlords, whose rents depended ultimately upon the price of corn,
+demanded protection corresponding to that which extensive tariffs on
+imported articles gave to the manufacturers. The manufacturers, on the
+other hand, wanted cheap food for their workpeople in order to be able
+to pay them low wages. As a compromise, the Corn Laws of 1814 and 1828
+provided a sliding scale of duties which rose as prices fell, and fell
+as prices rose, a preference being given to colonial wheat.
+
+The Reform Act of 1832, however, and the rapid increase of
+manufactures, transferred the balance of power in parliament from the
+landed to the manufacturing classes; factory hands were persuaded that
+the repeal of the duties would largely increase the value of their
+wages; and the failure of the potato-crop in Ireland in 1845-46
+rendered an increase of imported food-stuffs imperative. Sir Robert
+Peel accordingly carried a measure in 1846 providing for the gradual
+abolition of the corn-duties, saving only a registration duty of one
+shilling, which was removed some twenty years later. This repeal of the
+Corn Laws did not appreciably affect the price of corn, the great
+reduction of which was subsequently effected by the vast expansion of
+corn-growing areas in the colonies and abroad. But it enormously
+increased the supply at once, and gradually gave England the full
+benefit of growing areas and declining prices. It is obvious that the
+retention of the duty, which had been fixed at 24_s_. 8_d_. in 1828
+when the price was 62_s_. or less a quarter, would have prevented
+prices falling as they subsequently did below the value of the duty;
+and it is no less certain that it would have impeded the development of
+corn-growing districts in the colonies and abroad, and of British
+imports from, and exports to, them.
+
+The enormous increase in the import of corn helped, in fact, to double
+British exports within ten years. This was the result of the general
+freeing of trade, of which the repeal of the Corn Laws was only a part.
+In the third quarter of the eighteenth century there were hundreds of
+Acts, covering thousands of pages, on the statute-book, imposing an
+infinity of chaotic duties on every kind of import; they made the
+customs costly to collect and easy to evade; and the industry they
+stimulated most was smuggling. The younger Pitt, influenced by Adam
+Smith, whose _Wealth of Nations_ appeared in 1776, reduced and
+simplified these duties; but 443 Acts still survived when in 1825
+Huskisson and other enlightened statesmen secured their consolidation
+and reduction to eleven. This Tariff Reform, as its supporters called
+it, was a step towards Free Trade. Peel gradually adopted its
+principles, induced partly by the failure of his efforts to use
+existing duties for purposes of retaliation; and between 1841 and 1846
+he abolished the duties on 605 articles and reduced them on 1035 more,
+imposing a direct income-tax to replace the indirect taxes thus
+repealed. The process was completed by Gladstone, and what is called
+Free Trade was established as the fundamental principle of English
+financial policy.
+
+This does not mean that no duties are imposed on exports or imports; it
+simply means that such duties as are levied are imposed for the sake of
+revenue, and to protect neither the consumer from the export of
+commodities he desires to purchase, nor the manufacturer from the
+import of those he wishes to make. The great interests connected with
+land and manufactures had ceased to hang together, and fell separately.
+Protection of manufactured goods did not long survive the successful
+attack which manufacturers had levelled against the protected produce
+of the landlords and the farmers. The repeal of the Navigation Acts
+rounded off the system; British shipping, indeed, needed no protection,
+but the admission of colonial goods free of duty and the removal of the
+embargo on their trade with foreign countries may not have compensated
+the colonies for the loss of their preference in the British market.
+The whole trend of affairs, however, both conscious and unconscious,
+was to make the world one vast hive of industry, instead of an infinite
+number of self-sufficient, separate hives; the village market had
+expanded into the provincial market, the provincial into the national,
+the national into the imperial, and the imperial into the world market.
+
+We have not by any means exhausted the results of the Industrial
+Revolution, and most of our social problems may be traced directly or
+indirectly to this source. Its most general effect was to emphasize and
+exaggerate the tendency towards specialization. Not only have most
+workers now but one kind of work; that work becomes a smaller and
+smaller part of increasingly complex industrial processes; and
+concentration thereon makes it more and more difficult for the worker
+to turn to other labour, if his employment fails. The specialist's lack
+of all-round capacity is natural and notorious. Hence most serious
+results follow the slightest dislocation of national economy. This
+specialization has also important psychological effects. A farmer, with
+his varied outdoor occupations, feels little craving for relief and
+relaxation. The factory hand, with his attention riveted for hours at a
+stretch on the wearisome iteration of machinery, requires recreation
+and distraction: naturally he is a prey to unwholesome stimulants, such
+as drink, betting, or the yellow press. The more educated and morally
+restrained, however, seek intellectual stimulus, and the modern popular
+demand for culture arises largely from the need of something to relieve
+the grey monotony of industrial labour.
+
+So, too, the problems of poverty, local government, and sanitation have
+been created or intensified by the Industrial Revolution. It made
+capitalists of the few and wage-earners of the many; and the tendency
+of wages towards a minimum and of hours of labour towards a maximum has
+only been counteracted by painful organization among the workers, and
+later on by legislation extorted by their votes. Neither the
+Evangelical nor the Oxford movement proved any prophylactic against the
+immorality of commercial and industrial creeds. While those two
+religious movements were at their height, new centres of industrial
+population were allowed to grow up without the least regard for health
+or decency. Under the influence of _laissez-faire_ philosophy, each
+wretched slum-dweller was supposed to be capable, after his ten or
+twelve hours in the factory, of looking after his own and his
+children's education, his main-drainage, his risks from infection, and
+the purity of his food and his water-supply. The old system of local
+government was utterly inadequate and ill adapted to the new
+conditions; and the social and physical environment of the working
+classes was a disgrace to civilization pending the reconstruction of
+society, still incomplete, which the Industrial Revolution imposed upon
+the country in the nineteenth century.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A CENTURY OF EMPIRE
+
+1815-1911
+
+
+The British realms beyond the seas have little history before the
+battle of Waterloo, a date at which the Englishman's historical
+education has commonly come to an end; and if by chance it has gone any
+further, it has probably been confined to purely domestic events or to
+foreign episodes of such ephemeral interest as the Crimean War. It may
+be well, therefore, to pass lightly over these matters in order to
+sketch in brief outline the development of the empire and the problems
+which it involves. European affairs, in fact, played a very subordinate
+part in English history after 1815; so far as England was concerned, it
+was a period of excursions and alarms rather than actual hostilities;
+and the fortunes of English-speaking communities were not greatly
+affected by the revolutions and wars which made and marred continental
+nations, a circumstance which explains, if it does not excuse, the
+almost total ignorance of European history displayed in British
+colonies.
+
+The interventions of Britain in continental politics were generally on
+behalf of the principles of nationality and self-government. Under the
+influence of Castlereagh and Canning the British government gradually
+broke away from the Holy Alliance formed to suppress all protests
+against the settlement reached after Napoleon's fall; and Britain
+interposed with decisive effect at the battle of Navarino in 1827,
+which secured the independence of Greece from Turkey. More diplomatic
+intervention assisted the South American colonies to assert their
+independence of the Spanish mother-country; and British volunteers
+helped the Liberal cause in Spain and Portugal against reactionary
+monarchs. Belgium was countenanced in its successful revolution against
+the House of Orange, and Italian states in their revolts against native
+and foreign despots; the expulsion of the Hapsburgs and Bourbons from
+Italy, and its unification on a nationalist basis, owed something to
+British diplomacy, which supported Cavour, and to British volunteers
+who fought for Garibaldi. The attitude of Britain towards the Balkan
+nationalities, which were endeavouring to throw off the Turkish yoke,
+was more dubious; while Gladstone denounced Turkish atrocities,
+Disraeli strengthened Turkey's hands. Yet England would have been as
+enthusiastic for a liberated and united Balkan power as it had been for
+a united Italy but for the claims of a rival liberator, Russia.
+
+Russia was the bugbear of two generations of Englishmen; and classical
+scholars, who interpreted modern politics by the light of ancient
+Greece, saw in the absorption of Athens by Macedon a convincing
+demonstration of the fate which the modern barbarian of the north was
+to inflict upon the British heirs of Hellas. India was the real source
+of this nervousness. British dominion, after further wars with the
+Mahrattas, the Sikhs, and the Gurkhas, had extended up to the frontiers
+of Afghanistan; but there was always the fear lest another sword should
+take away dominion won by the British, and in British eyes it was an
+offence that any other power should expand in Asia. The Russian and
+British spheres of influence advanced till they met in Kabul; and for
+fifty years the two powers contested, by more or less diplomatic
+methods, the control of the Amir of Afghanistan. Turkey flanked the
+overland route to India; and hence the protection of Turkey against
+Russia became a cardinal point in British foreign policy. On behalf of
+Turkey's integrity Great Britain fought, in alliance with France and
+Sardinia, the futile Crimean War of 1854-1856, and nearly went to war
+in 1877.
+
+The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 introduced a fresh complication.
+Relations between England and France had since Waterloo been friendly,
+on the whole; but France had traditional interests in Egypt, which were
+strengthened by the fact that a French engineer had constructed the
+Suez Canal, and by French colonies in the Far East, to which the canal
+was the shortest route. Rivalry with England for the control of Egypt
+followed. The Dual Control, which was established in 1876, was
+terminated by the refusal of France to assist in the suppression of
+Egyptian revolts in 1882; and Great Britain was left in sole but
+informal possession of power in Egypt, with the responsibility for its
+defence against the Mahdi (1884-1885) and for the re-conquest of the
+Sudan (1896-1898), which is now under the joint Egyptian and British
+flags.
+
+Meanwhile, British expansion to the east of India, the Burmese wars,
+and annexation of Burma (1885) brought the empire into a contact with
+French influence in Siam similar to its contact with Russian in
+Afghanistan. Community of interests in the Far East, as well as the
+need of protection against the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and
+Italy produced the _entente cordiale_ between France and Russia in
+1890. Fortunately, the dangerous questions between them and Great
+Britain were settled by diplomacy, assisted by the alliance between
+Great Britain and Japan. The British and Russian spheres of action on
+the north-west, and the British and French spheres to the east, of
+India were delimited; southern Persia, the Persian Gulf, and the Malay
+Peninsula were left to British vigilance and penetration, northern
+Persia to Russian, and eastern Siam to French. Freed from these causes
+of friction, Great Britain, Russia, and France exert a restraining
+influence on the predominant partner in the Triple Alliance.
+
+The development of a vast dominion in India has created for the British
+government problems, of which the great Indian mutiny of 1857 was
+merely one illustration. No power has succeeded in permanently
+governing subject races by despotic authority; in North and South
+America the natives have so dwindled in numbers as to leave the
+conquerors indisputably supreme; in Europe and elsewhere in former
+times the subject races fitted themselves for self-government, and then
+absorbed their conquerors. The racial and religious gulf forbids a
+similar solution of the Indian question, while the abandonment of her
+task by Great Britain would leave India a prey to anarchy. The
+difficulties of despotic rule were mitigated in the past by the utter
+absence of any common sentiments and ideas among the many races,
+religions, and castes which constituted India; and a Machiavellian
+perpetuation of these divisions might have eased the labours of its
+governors. But a government suffers for its virtues, and the steady
+efforts of Great Britain to civilize and educate its Eastern subjects
+have tended to destroy the divisions which made common action, common
+aspirations, public opinion and self-government impossible in India.
+The missionary, the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer, and the political
+reformer have all helped to remove the bars of caste and race by
+converting Brahmans, Mohammedans, Parsees to a common Christianity or
+by undermining their attachment to their particular distinctions. They
+have built railways and canals, which made communications and contact
+unavoidable; they have imposed common measures of health, common legal
+principles, and a common education in English culture and methods of
+administration. The result has been to foster a consciousness of
+nationality, the growth of a public opinion, and a demand for a greater
+share in the management of affairs. The more efficient a despotism, the
+more certain is its supersession; and the problem for the Indian
+government is how to adjust and adapt the political emancipation of the
+natives of India to the slow growth of their education and sense of
+moral responsibility. At present, caste and racial and religious
+differences, especially between Mohammedans and Hindus, though
+weakening, are powerful disintegrants; not one per cent of the
+population can read or write; and the existence of hundreds of native
+states impedes the progress of national agitation.
+
+A somewhat similar problem confronts British administration in Egypt,
+where the difficulty of dealing with the agitation for national self-
+government is complicated by the fact that technically the British
+agent and consul-general is merely the informal adviser of the khedive,
+who is himself the viceroy of the Sultan of Turkey. Ultimately the same
+sort of dilemma will have to be faced in other parts of Africa under
+British rule--British East Africa and Uganda, the Nigerian
+protectorates and neighbouring districts, Rhodesia and British Central
+Africa--as well as in the Malay States, Hong Kong, and the West Indies.
+There are great differences of opinion among the white citizens of the
+empire with regard to the treatment of their coloured fellow-subjects.
+Australia and some provinces of the South African Union would exclude
+Indian immigrants altogether; and white minorities have an invincible
+repugnance to allowing black majorities to exercise a vote, except
+under stringent precautions against its effect. We have, indeed,
+improved upon the Greeks, who regarded all other races as outside the
+scope of Greek morality; but we do not yet extend to coloured races the
+same consideration that we do to white men.
+
+So far as the white population of the empire is concerned, the problem
+of self-government was solved in the nineteenth century by procedure
+common to all the great dominions of the crown, though the
+emancipation, which had cost the mother-country centuries of conflict,
+was secured by many colonies in less than fifty years. Three normal
+stages marked their progress, and Canada led the way in each. The first
+was the acquisition of representative government--that is to say, of a
+legislature consisting generally of two Houses, one of which was
+popularly elected but had little control over the executive; the second
+was the acquisition of responsible government--that is to say, of an
+executive responsible to the popular local legislature instead of to
+the home Colonial Office; and the third was federation. Canada had
+possessed the first degree of self-government ever since 1791 (see p.
+169), and was rapidly outgrowing it. Australia, however, did not pass
+out of the crown colony stage, in which affairs are controlled by a
+governor, with or without the assistance of a nominated legislative
+council, until 1842, when elected members were added to the council of
+New South Wales, and it was given the power of the purse. This
+development was due to the exodus of the surplus population, created by
+the Industrial Revolution, from Great Britain, which began soon after
+1820, and affected Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
+Various companies and associations were founded under the influence of
+Lord Durham, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, and others, for the purpose of
+settling labourers in these lands. Between 1820 and 1830 several
+settlements were established in Western Australia, in 1836 South
+Australia was colonized, and gradually Victoria, Queensland, and
+Tasmania were organized as independent colonies out of offshoots from
+the parent New South Wales. Each in turn received a representative
+assembly, and developed individual characteristics.
+
+Cape Colony followed on similar lines, variegated by the presence of a
+rival European race, the Dutch. Slowly, in the generation which
+succeeded the British conquest, they accumulated grievances against
+their rulers. English was made the sole official language; Dutch
+magistrates were superseded by English commissioners; slavery was
+abolished, with inadequate compensation to the owners; little support
+was given them in their wars with the natives, which the home
+government and the missionaries, more interested in the woes of negroes
+in South Africa than in those of children in British mines and
+factories, attributed to Dutch brutality; and a Hottentot police was
+actually established. In 1837 the more determined of the Dutch
+"trekked" north and east to found republics in Natal, the Orange River
+Free State, and the Transvaal. Purged of these discontented elements,
+the Cape was given representative government in 1853, and Natal, which
+had been annexed in 1844, received a similar constitution in 1856.
+
+Meanwhile, Canada had advanced through constitutional struggles and
+open rebellion to the second stage. It had received its baptism of fire
+during the war (1812-1814) between Great Britain and the United States,
+when French and British Canadians fought side by side against a common
+enemy. But both provinces soon experienced difficulties similar to
+those between the Stuarts and their parliaments; their legislative
+assemblies had no control over their executive governments, and in 1837
+Papineau's rebellion broke out in Lower, and Mackenzie's in Upper,
+Canada. Lord Durham was sent out to investigate the causes of
+discontent, and his report marks an epoch in colonial history. The idea
+that the American War of Independence had taught the mother-country the
+necessity of granting complete self-government to her colonies is a
+persistent misconception; and hitherto no British colony had received a
+fuller measure of self-government than had been enjoyed by the American
+colonies before their Declaration of Independence. The grant of this
+responsible self-government was one of the two principal
+recommendations of Lord Durham's report. The other was the union of the
+two provinces, which, it was hoped, would give the British a majority
+over the French. This recommendation, which ultimately proved
+unworkable, was carried out at once; the other, which has been the
+saving of the empire, was left for Lord Elgin to elaborate. He made it
+a principle to choose as ministers only those politicians who possessed
+the confidence of the popular assembly, and his example, followed by
+his successors, crystallized into a fundamental maxim of British
+colonial government. It was extended to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick
+in 1848, and to Newfoundland (which had in 1832 received a legislative
+assembly) in 1855.
+
+To Lord John Russell, who was prime minister from 1846 to 1851, to his
+colonial secretary, the third Earl Grey, and to Lords Aberdeen and
+Palmerston, who succeeded as premiers in 1852 and 1855, belongs the
+credit of having conferred full rights of self-government on most of
+the empire's oversea dominions. Australia, where the discovery of gold
+in 1851 added enormously to her population, soon followed in Canada's
+wake, and by 1856 every Australian colony, with the exception of
+Western Australia, had, with the consent of the Imperial parliament,
+worked out a constitution for itself, comprising two legislative
+chambers and a responsible cabinet. New Zealand, which had begun to be
+sparsely settled between 1820 and 1840, and had been annexed in the
+latter year, received in 1852 from the Imperial parliament a
+Constitution Act, which left it to Sir George Grey, the Governor, to
+work out in practice the responsibility of ministers to the
+legislature. Other colonies were slower in their constitutional
+development; Cape Colony was not granted a responsible administration
+till 1872; Western Australia, which had continued to receive convicts
+after their transportation to other Australian colonies had been
+successfully resisted, did not receive complete self-government till
+1890, and Natal not until 1893.
+
+The latest British colonies to receive this livery of the empire were
+the Transvaal and the Orange River colonies. A chequered existence had
+been their fate since their founders had trekked north in 1837. The
+Orange River Free State had been annexed by Britain in 1848, had
+rebelled, and been granted independence again in 1854. The Transvaal
+had been annexed in 1877, had rebelled, and had been granted almost
+complete independence again after Majuba in 1881. The Orange Free
+State, relieved of the diamond fields which belonged to it in the
+neighbourhood of Kimberley in 1870, pursued the even tenor of its way;
+but the gold mines discovered in the Transvaal were not so near its
+borders, and gave rise to more prolonged dissensions. Crowds of
+cosmopolitan adventurers, as lawless as those who disturbed the peace
+in Victoria or California, flocked to the Rand. They were not of the
+stuff of which Dutch burghers were made, and the franchise was denied
+them by a government which did not hesitate to profit from their
+labours. The Jameson Raid, a hasty attempt to use their wrongs to
+overthrow President Kruger's government in 1895, "upset the apple-cart"
+of Cecil Rhodes, the prime minister of the Cape, who had added Rhodesia
+to the empire and was planning, with moderate Dutch support, to
+federate South Africa. Kruger hardened his heart against the
+Uitlanders, and armed himself to resist the arguments of the British
+government on their behalf. Both sides underestimated the determination
+and resources of the other. But Kruger was more ignorant, if not more
+obstinate, than Mr. Chamberlain; and his ultimatum of October 1899
+precipitated a war which lasted two years and a half, and cost the two
+republics their independence. The Transvaal was given, and the Orange
+River Colony was promised, representative government by the
+Conservatives; but the Liberals, who came into power at the end of
+1905, excused them this apprenticeship, and granted them full
+responsible government in 1906-1907.
+
+British colonies have tried a series of useful experiments with the
+power thus allotted them of managing their own affairs, and have
+contributed more to the science of politics than all the arm-chair
+philosophers from Aristotle downwards; and an examination in their
+results would be a valuable test for aspiring politicians and civil
+servants. The Canadian provinces, with two exceptions, dispense with a
+second chamber; elsewhere in the empire, second chambers are universal,
+but nowhere outside the United Kingdom hereditary. Their members are
+either nominated by the prime minister for life, as in the Dominion of
+Canada, or for a term of years, which is fixed at seven in New Zealand;
+or they are popularly elected, sometimes on a different property
+qualification from the Lower House, sometimes for a different period,
+sometimes by a different constituency. In the Commonwealth of Australia
+they are chosen by each state voting as a whole, and this method, by
+which a big majority in one locality outweighs several small majorities
+in others, has sometimes resulted in making the Upper House more
+radical and socialistic than the Lower; the system of nomination
+occasionally has in Canada a result equally strange to English ideas,
+for the present Conservative majority in the House of Commons is
+confronted with a hostile Liberal majority in the Upper House, placed
+there by Sir Wilfrid Laurier during his long tenure of office. The most
+effective provision against deadlocks between the two Houses is one in
+the constitution of the Australian Commonwealth, by which, if they
+cannot agree, both are dissolved.
+
+Other contrasts are more bewildering than instructive. In Canada the
+movement for women's suffrage has made little headway, and even less in
+South Africa; but at the Antipodes women share with men the privilege
+of adult suffrage in New Zealand, in the Commonwealth of Australia, and
+in every one of its component states; an advocate of the cause would
+perhaps explain the contrast by the presence of unprogressive French in
+Canada, and of unprogressive Dutch in South Africa. Certainly, the all-
+British dominions have been more advanced in their political
+experiments than those in which the flighty Anglo-Saxon has been
+tempered by more stolid elements; and the pendulum swings little more
+in French Canada than it does in Celtic Ireland. In New Zealand old age
+pensions were in force long before they were introduced into the
+mother-country; and compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes,
+payment of M.P.'s, and powers of local option and prohibition have been
+for years in operation. Both the Dominion and the Commonwealth levy
+taxes on land far exceeding those imposed by the British budget of
+1909. Australia is, in addition, trying a socialistic labour ministry
+and compulsory military training. It has also tried the more serious
+experiment of developing a standard of comfort among its proletariate
+before peopling the country; and is consequently forced to exclude by
+legislation all sorts of cheap labour, which might develop its
+industries but would certainly lower its level of wages. It believes in
+high protection, but takes care by socialistic legislation that high
+wages shall more than counterbalance high prices; protection is to it
+merely the form of state socialism which primarily benefits the
+employer. It has also nationalized its railways and denationalized all
+churches and religious instruction in public schools. There is, indeed,
+no state church in the empire outside Great Britain. But the most
+significant, perhaps, of Antipodean notions is the doctrine, inculcated
+in the Queensland elementary schools, of the sanctity of state
+property.
+
+Finally, the colonies have made momentous experiments in federation.
+New Zealand's was the earliest and the briefest; after a few years'
+experience of provincial governments between 1852 and 1870, it reduced
+its provincial parliaments to the level of county councils, and adopted
+a unitary constitution. In Canada, on the other hand, the union of the
+Upper and Lower Provinces proved unworkable owing to racial
+differences; and in 1867 the federation called the Dominion of Canada
+was formed by agreement between Upper and Lower Canada (henceforth
+called Ontario and Quebec), New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. Prince
+Edward Island and British Columbia joined soon afterwards; and fresh
+provinces have since been created out of the Hudson Bay and North-west
+Territories; Newfoundland alone has stood aloof. Considerable powers
+are allotted to the provinces, including education; but the
+distinguishing feature of this federation is that all powers not
+definitely assigned by the Dominion Act to the provinces belong to the
+Dominion. This is in sharp contrast to the United States, where each
+individual state is the sovereign body, and the Federal government only
+possesses such powers as the states have delegated to it by the
+constitution.
+
+In this respect the Australian federation called the Commonwealth,
+which was formed in 1900, resembles the United States rather than
+Canada. The circumstance that each Australian colony grew up round a
+seaport, having little or no overland connexion with other Australian
+colonies, kept them long apart; and the commercial interests centred in
+these ports are still centrifugal rather than centripetal in sentiment.
+Hence powers, not specifically assigned to the Federal government,
+remain in the hands of the individual states; the Labour party,
+however, inclines towards a centralizing policy, and the general trend
+seems to be in that direction. It will probably be strengthened by the
+construction of transcontinental railways and by a further growth of
+the nationalist feeling of Australia, which is already marked.
+
+The Union of South Africa, formed in 1909, soon after the Boer colonies
+had received self-government, went almost as far towards unification as
+New Zealand, and became a unitary state rather than a federation. The
+greater expense of maintaining several local parliaments as well as a
+central legislature, and the difficulty of apportioning their powers,
+determined South African statesmen to sweep away the old legislatures
+altogether, and to establish a united parliament which meets at Cape
+Town, a single executive which has its offices at Pretoria, and a
+judicature which is located at Bloemfontein. Thus almost every variety
+of Union and Home Rule exists within the empire, and arguments from
+analogy are provided for both the British political parties.
+
+Two extremes have been, and must be, avoided. History has falsified the
+impression prevalent in the middle of the nineteenth century that the
+colonies would sooner or later follow the example of the United States,
+and sever their connexion with the mother-country. It has no less
+clearly demonstrated the impossibility of maintaining a centralized
+government of the empire in Downing Street. The union or federation of
+Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa has strengthened the
+claims of each of those imperial realms to be considered a nation, with
+full rights and powers of self-government; and it remains to be seen
+whether the federating process can be carried to a higher level, and
+imperial sentiment crystallized in Imperial Federation. Imperial
+Conferences have become regular, but we may not call them councils; no
+majority in them has power to bind a minority, and no conference can
+bind the mother-country or a single dominion of the crown. As an
+educational body the Imperial Conference is excellent; but no one would
+venture to give powers of taxation or of making war and peace to a
+conclave in which Great Britain, with its forty-four millions of people
+and the navy and army it supports, has no more votes than Newfoundland,
+with its quarter of a million of inhabitants and immunity from imperial
+burdens.
+
+Education is, however, at the root of all political systems. Where the
+mass of the people know nothing of politics, a despotism is essential;
+where only the few are politically educated, there needs must be an
+aristocracy. Great Britain lost its American colonies largely through
+ignorance; and no imperial organization could arise among a group of
+states ignorant of each other's needs, resources, and aspirations. The
+Imperial Conference is not to be judged by its meagre tangible results;
+if it has led British politicians to appreciate the varying character
+and depth of national feeling in the Dominions, and politicians oversea
+to appreciate the delicacies of the European diplomatic situation, the
+dependence of every part of the empire upon sea-power, and the
+complexities of an Imperial government which has also to consider the
+interests of hundreds of millions of subjects in India, in tropical
+Africa, in the West Indies, and in the Pacific, the Conference will
+have helped to foster the intellectual conditions which must underlie
+any attempt at an imperial superstructure.
+
+For the halcyon days of peace, prosperity, and progress can hardly be
+assumed as yet, and not even the most distant and self-contained
+Dominions can afford to ignore the menace of blood and iron. No power,
+indeed, is likely to find the thousand millions or so which it would
+cost to conquer and hold Canada, Australia, or South Africa; but a
+lucky raid on their commerce or some undefended port might cost many
+millions by way of ransom. A slackening birth-rate is, moreover, a
+reminder that empires in the past, like that of Rome, have civilized
+themselves out of existence in the competition with races which bred
+with primitive vigour, and had no costly standards of comfort. There
+are such races to-day; the slumbering East has wakened, and the tide
+which flowed for four centuries from West to East is on the turn. The
+victory of Japan over Russia was an event beside which the great Boer
+War sinks into insignificance. Asiatics, relieved by the _Pax
+Britannica_ from mutual destruction, are eating the whites out of
+the islands of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and threatening South
+Africa, Australia, and the western shores of America. No armaments and
+no treaties of arbitration can ward off their economic competition; and
+it is not certain that their myriads, armed with Western morality and
+methods of warfare, will be always content to refrain from turning
+against Europe the means of expansion which Europe has used with so
+much success against them. The British Empire will need all the wisdom
+it can command, if it is to hold its own in the parliament of reason or
+the arbitrament of war.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+ENGLISH DEMOCRACY
+
+
+The modern national state is the most powerful political organism ever
+known, because it is the conscious or unconscious agency of a people's
+will. Government is no longer in England the instrument of a family or
+a class; and the only real check upon its power is the circumstance
+that in some matters it acts as the executive committee of one party
+and is legitimately resisted by the other. Were there no parties, the
+government would be a popular despotism absolutely uncontrolled.
+Theoretically it is omnicompetent; parliament--or, to use more
+technical phraseology, the Crown in Parliament--can make anything law
+that it chooses; and no one has a legal right to resist, or authority
+to pronounce what parliament has done to be unconstitutional. No Act of
+Parliament can be illegal or unconstitutional, because there are no
+fundamental laws and no written constitution in this country; and when
+people loosely speak of an Act being unconstitutional, all that they
+mean is that they do not agree with it. Other countries, like the
+United States, have drawn up a written constitution and established a
+Supreme Court of Judicature to guard it; and if the American
+legislature violates this constitution by any Act, the Supreme Court
+may declare that Act unconstitutional, in which case it is void. But
+there is no such limitation in England upon the sovereignty of
+parliament.
+
+This sovereignty has been gradually evolved. At first it was royal and
+personal, but not parliamentary or representative; and medieval kings
+had to struggle with the rival claims of the barons and the church. By
+calling in the assistance of the people assembled and represented in
+parliament, the monarchy triumphed over both the barons and the church;
+but when, in the seventeenth century, the two partners to this victory
+quarrelled over the spoils, parliament and not the crown established
+its claim to be the real representative of the state; and in the cases
+of Strafford, Danby, and others it even asserted that loyalty to the
+king might be treason to the state. The church, vanquished at the
+Reformation, dropped more and more out of the struggle for sovereignty,
+because, while the state grew more comprehensive, the church grew more
+exclusive. It was not that, after 1662, it seriously narrowed its
+formulas or doctrines, but it failed to enlarge them, and a larger and
+larger proportion of Englishmen thus found themselves outside its pale.
+The state, on the other hand, embraced an ever-widening circle of
+dissent; and by degrees Protestant Nonconformists, Roman Catholics,
+Quakers, Jews, Atheists, Mohammedans, believers, misbelievers, and
+unbelievers of all sorts, were admitted to the fullest rights of
+citizenship. State and church ceased to correspond; one became the
+whole, the other only a part, and there could be no serious rivalry
+between the two.
+
+The state had to contend, however, with more subtle and serious
+attacks. This great Leviathan, as Hobbes called it, was not at first a
+popular institution; and it frightened many people. The American
+colonists, for instance, thought that its absolute sovereignty was too
+dangerous a thing to be left loose, and they put sovereignty under a
+triple lock and key, giving one to the judicature, one to the
+legislature, and a third to the executive. Only by the co-operation of
+these three keepers can the American people loose their sovereignty and
+use it to amend their constitution; and so jealously is sovereignty
+confined that anarchy often seems to reign in its stead. There was,
+indeed, some excuse for distrusting a sovereignty claimed by George III
+and the unreformed British parliament; and it was natural enough that
+people should deny its necessity and set up in its place Declarations
+of the Rights of Man. Sovereignty of Hobbes's type was a somewhat novel
+conception; men had not grasped its possibilities as an engine of
+popular will, because they were only familiar with its exploitation by
+kings and oligarchs; and so closely did they identify the thing with
+its abuses that they preferred to do without it altogether, or at least
+to confine it to the narrowest possible limits. Government and the
+people were antagonistic: the less government there was, the less harm
+would be done to the people, and so a general body of individualistic,
+_laissez-faire_ theory developed, which was expressed in various
+Declarations of the Rights of Man, and set up against the "paternal
+despotism" of the eighteenth century.
+
+These Rights of Man helped to produce alike the anarchy of the first
+French Revolution and the remedial despotism of the Jacobins and their
+successor Napoleon; and the oscillation between under-government and
+over-government, between individualism and socialism has continued to
+this day. Each coincides with obvious human interests: the blessed in
+possession prefer a policy of _laissez faire_; they are all for
+Liberty and Property, enjoying sufficient means for doing whatsoever
+they like with what they are pleased to call their own. But those who
+have little to call their own, and much that they would like, prefer
+strong government if they can control it; and the strength of
+government has steadily grown with popular control. This is due to more
+than a predatory instinct; it is natural, and excusable enough, that
+people should be reluctant to maintain what is no affair of theirs; but
+even staunch Conservatives have been known to pay Radical taxes with
+comparative cheerfulness when their party has returned to power.
+
+Government was gradually made the affair of the people by the series of
+Reform Acts extending from 1832 to 1885; and it is no mere accident
+that this half-century also witnessed the political emancipation of the
+British colonies. Nor must we forget the Acts beginning with the repeal
+of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) and Roman Catholic Emancipation
+(1829), which extended political rights to men of all religious
+persuasions. These and the Franchise Acts made the House of Commons
+infinitely more representative than it had been before, and gave it its
+conclusive superiority over the House of Lords. Not that the Peers
+represent no one but themselves; had that been true, the House of Lords
+would have disappeared long ago. In reality it came to embody a fairly
+complete representation of the Conservative party; and as a party does
+not need two legislative organs, the House of Lords retired whenever
+the Conservatives controlled the House of Commons, and only resumed its
+proper functions when the Liberals had a majority. Hence its most
+indefensible characteristic as a Second Chamber became its strongest
+practical bulwark; for it enlisted the support of many who had no
+particular views about Second Chambers in the abstract, but were keenly
+interested in the predominance of their party.
+
+The restraint thus imposed by the House of Lords upon popular
+government checked the development of its power and the extension of
+its activity, which would naturally have followed upon the acquisition
+by the people of control over the House of Commons and indirectly over
+the Cabinet. Other causes co-operated to induce delay. The most
+powerful was lack of popular education; constitutional privileges are
+of no value to people who do not understand how they may be used, or
+are so unimaginative and ill-disciplined as to prefer such immediate
+and tangible rewards as a half-crown for their vote, a donation to
+their football club or local charity, or a gracious word from an
+interested lady, to their distant and infinitesimal share in the
+direction of national government. This participation is, in fact, so
+minute to the individual voter and so intangible in its operation, that
+a high degree of education is required to appreciate its value; and the
+Education Acts of 1870 and 1889 were indispensable preliminaries to
+anything like a real democracy. A democracy really educated in politics
+will express views strange to our ears with an emphasis of which even
+yet we have little conception.
+
+Other obstacles to the overthrow of the rule of _laissez faire_
+were the vested interests of over-mighty manufacturers and landlords in
+the maintenance of that anarchy which is the logical extreme of Liberty
+and Property; and such elementary measures of humanity as the Factory
+Acts were long resisted by men so humane as Cobden and John Bright as
+arbitrary interventions with the natural liberty of man to drive
+bargains with his fellows in search of a living wage. There seemed to
+be no idea that economic warfare might be quite as degrading as that
+primitive condition of natural war, in which Hobbes said that the life
+of man was "nasty, short, brutish and mean," and that it might as
+urgently require a similar sovereign remedy. The repugnance to such a
+remedy was reinforced by crude analogies between a perverted Darwinism
+and politics. Darwin's demonstration of evolution by means of the
+struggle for existence in the natural world was used to support the
+assumption that a similar struggle among civilized men was natural and
+therefore inevitable; and that all attempts to interfere with the
+conflict between the weak and the strong, the scrupulous and the
+unscrupulous, were foredoomed to disastrous failure. It was forgotten
+that civilization itself involves a more or less conscious repeal of
+"Nature," and that the progress of man depends upon the conquest of
+himself and of his surroundings. In a better sense of the word, the
+evolution of man's self-control and conscience is just as "natural" as
+the gratification of his animal instincts.
+
+The view that each individual should be left without further help from
+the state to cope with his environment might be acceptable to landlords
+who had already obtained from parliament hundreds of Inclosure Acts,
+and to manufacturers whose profits were inflated by laws making it
+criminal for workmen to combine. They might rest from political
+agitation and be thankful for their constitutional gains; at any rate
+they had little to hope from a legislature in which working men had
+votes. But the masses, who had just secured the franchise, were
+reluctant to believe that the action of the state had lost its virtue
+at the moment when the control of the state came within their grasp.
+The vote seems to have been given them under the amiable delusion that
+they would be happy when they got it, as if it had any value whatever
+except as a means to an end. Nor is it adequate as a means: it is not
+sufficient for a nation by adult suffrage to express its will; that
+will has also to be carried into execution, and it requires a strong
+executive to do so. Hence the reversal of the old Liberal attitude
+towards the royal prerogative, which may be best dated from 1872, when
+Gladstone abolished the purchase of commissions in the army by means of
+the royal prerogative, after the proposed reform had been rejected as a
+bill by the House of Lords. No Liberal is likely in the future to
+suggest that "the influence of the crown has increased, is increasing,
+and ought to be diminished"; because the prerogative of the crown has
+become the privilege of the people.
+
+The Franchise Acts had apparently provided a solution of the old
+antithesis of Man _versus_ the State by comprehending all men
+_in_ the state; and the great value of those reforms was that they
+tended to eliminate force from the sphere of politics. When men could
+vote, there was less reason in rebellion; and the antithesis of Man
+_versus_ the State has almost been reduced to one of Woman _versus_ the
+State. But representative government, which promised to be ideal when
+every man, or every adult, had a vote, is threatened in various
+quarters. Its operations are too deliberate and involved to satisfy
+impatient spirits, and three alternative methods of procedure are
+advocated as improvements upon it. One is the "direct action" of
+working men, by which they can speedily obtain their objects through a
+general or partial strike paralyzing the food supply or other national
+necessities. This is obviously a dangerous and double-edged weapon, the
+adoption of which by other sections of the community--the Army and
+Navy, for instance, or the medical profession--might mean national
+dissolution.
+
+Another method is the Referendum, by which important decisions adopted
+by parliament would be referred to a direct popular vote. This proposal
+is only logical when coupled with the Initiative, by which a direct
+popular vote could compel parliament to pass any measure desired by the
+majority of voters; otherwise its object is merely obstructive. The
+third method is the supersession of parliament by the action of the
+executive. The difficulties which Liberal measures have experienced in
+the House of Lords, and the impossibility of the House of Commons
+dealing by debate with the increasing complexities of national
+business, have encouraged a tendency in Liberal governments to entrust
+to their departments decisions which trench upon the legislative
+functions of parliament. The trend of hostile opinion is to regard
+parliament as an unnecessary middleman, and to advocate in its stead a
+sort of plebiscitary bureaucracy, a constitution under which
+legislation drafted by officials would be demanded, sanctioned, or
+rejected by direct popular vote, and would be discussed, like the
+Insurance Bill, in informal conferences outside, rather than inside,
+parliament; while administration by a vast army of experts would be
+partially controlled by popularly elected ministers; for socialists
+waver between their faith in human equality and their trust in the
+superman. Others think that the milder method of Devolution, or "Home
+Rule all round," would meet the evils caused by the congestion of
+business, and restore to the Mother of Parliaments her time-honoured
+function of governing by debate.
+
+Parliament has already had to delegate legislative powers to other
+bodies than colonial legislatures; and county councils, borough
+councils, district councils, and parish councils share with it in
+various degrees the task of legislating for the country. They can, of
+course, only legislate, as they can only administer, within the limits
+imposed by Act of Parliament; but their development, like the
+multiplication of central administrative departments, indicates the
+latest, but not the final, stages in the growth and specialization of
+English government. A century and a half ago two Secretaries of State
+were all that Great Britain required; now there are half-a-dozen, and a
+dozen other departments have been added. Among them are the Local
+Government Board, the Board of Education, the Board of Trade, the Board
+of Agriculture, while many sub-departments such as the Public Health
+Department of the Local Government Board, the Bankruptcy Department of
+the Board of Trade, and the Factory Department of the Home Office, have
+more work to do than originally had a Secretary of State. It is
+probable, moreover, that departments will multiply and subdivide at an
+ever-increasing rate.
+
+All this, however, is merely machinery provided to give effect to
+public opinion, which determines the use to which it shall be put. But
+its very provision indicates that England expects the state to-day to
+do more and more extensive duty for the individual. For one thing the
+state has largely taken the place of the church as the organ of the
+collective conscience of the community. It can hardly be said that the
+Anglican church has an articulate conscience apart from questions of
+canon law and ecclesiastical property; and other churches are, as
+bodies, no better provided with creeds of social morality. The Eighth
+Commandment is never applied to such genteel delinquencies as making a
+false return of income, or defrauding a railway company or the customs;
+but is reserved for the grosser offences which no member of the
+congregation is likely to have committed; and it is left to the state
+to provide by warning and penalty against neglect of one's duty to
+one's neighbour when one's neighbour is not one individual but the sum
+of all. It was not by any ecclesiastical agitation that some humanity
+was introduced into the criminal code in the third decade of the
+nineteenth century; and the protest against the blind cruelty of
+economic _laissez faire_ was made by Sadler, Shaftesbury, Ruskin,
+and Carlyle rather than by any church. Their writings and speeches
+awoke a conscience in the state, which began to insist by means of
+legislation upon humaner hours and conditions of labour, upon decent
+sanitation, upon a standard of public education, and upon provision
+being made against fraudulent dealings with more helpless fellow-men.
+
+This public conscience has inevitably proved expensive, and the expense
+has had to be borne either by the state or by the individual. Now, it
+might have been possible, when the expense of these new standards of
+public health and comfort began to be incurred, to provide by an heroic
+effort of socialism for a perpetuation of the individualistic basis of
+social duty. That is to say, if the state had guaranteed to every
+individual an income which would enable him to bear his share of this
+expense, it might also have imposed upon him the duty of meeting it, of
+paying fees for the education of his children, for hospital treatment,
+for medical inspection, and so forth. But that effort was not, and
+perhaps could not, in the existing condition of public opinion, be
+made; and the state has therefore got into the habit of providing and
+paying for all these things itself. When the majority of male adults
+earn twenty shillings or less a week, and possess a vote, there would
+be no raising of standards at all, if they had to pay the cost. Hence
+the state has been compelled step by step to meet the expense of
+burdens imposed by its conscience. Free education has therefore
+followed compulsory education; the demands of sanitary inspectors and
+medical officers of health have led to free medical inspection, medical
+treatment, the feeding of necessitous school children, and other
+piecemeal socialism; and, ignoring the historical causes of this
+development, we are embarked on a wordy warfare of socialists and
+individualists as to the abstract merits of antagonistic theories.
+
+It is mainly a battle of phrases, in which few pause to examine what
+their opponents or they themselves mean by the epithets they employ. In
+the sense in which the individualist uses the term socialist, there are
+hardly any socialists, and in the sense in which the socialist uses the
+term individualist, there are practically no individualists. In reality
+we are all both individualists and socialists. It is a question of
+degree and not of dogma; and most people are at heart agreed that some
+economic socialism is required in order to promote a certain amount of
+moral and intellectual individualism. The defect of so-called economic
+individualism is that it reduces the mass of workers to one dead level
+of common poverty, in which wages, instead of increasing like capital,
+barely keep pace with the rise of rent and prices, in which men occupy
+dwellings all alike in the same mean streets, pursuing the same routine
+of labour and same trivial round of relaxation, and in which there
+seems no possibility of securing for the individual adequate
+opportunities for that development of his individuality by which alone
+he can render his best service to the community.
+
+That service is the common end and object towards which men of all
+parties in English history have striven through the growth of conscious
+and collective action. A communist has maintained that we are all
+communists because we have developed a common army, a common navy, and
+a common national government, in place of the individualistic forces
+and jurisdictions of feudal barons. We have, indeed, nationalized these
+things and many others as well, including the crown, the church, the
+administration of justice, education, highways and byways, posts and
+telegraphs, woods and forests. Even the House of Lords has been
+constrained to abandon its independence by a process akin to that
+medieval _peine forte et dure_, by which the obstinate individualist
+was, when accused, compelled to surrender his ancient immunity and
+submit to the common law; and this common control, which came into
+being as the nation emerged out of its diverse elements in the
+thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and slowly gathered force as
+it realized its strength under the Tudors, has attained fresh momentum
+in the latest ages as the state step by step extended to all sorts and
+conditions of men a share in the exercise of its power.
+
+This is the real English conquest, and it forms the chief content of
+English history. It is part of the triumph of man over the forces of
+nature and over himself, and the two have gone hand in hand. An English
+state could hardly exist before men had made roads, but it could no
+more exist until they had achieved that great victory of civilized
+government by which a minority agrees for the sake of peace to submit
+to the greater number. Steam and railways and telegraphs have placed
+further powers in the hands of men; they have conquered the land and
+the sea and the air; and medical science has built up their physique
+and paved the way for empire in tropical climes. But while he has
+conquered nature, man has also conquered himself. He has tamed his
+combative instincts; he has reduced civil strife to political combats,
+restrained national conflicts by treaties of arbitration, and subdued
+private wars to judicial proceedings; it is only in partially civilized
+countries that gentlemen cannot rule their temper or bend their honour
+to the base arbitrament of justice. He looks before and after, and
+forgoes the gratification of the present to insure against the
+accidents of the future, though the extent to which the community as a
+whole can follow the example of individuals in this respect remains at
+the moment a test of its self-control and sense of collective
+responsibility.
+
+Whether this growth of power in the individual and in the state is a
+good or an evil thing depends on the conscience of those who wield it.
+The power of the over-mighty subject has generally been a tyranny; and
+all power is distrusted by old-fashioned Liberals and philosophic
+Anarchists, because they have a traditional suspicion that it will fall
+into hostile or unscrupulous hands. But the forces of evil cannot be
+overcome by _laissez faire_, and power is an indispensable weapon
+of progress. A powerless state means a helpless community; and anarchy
+is the worst of all forms of tyranny, because it is irresponsible,
+incorrigible, and capricious. Weakness, moreover, is the parent of
+panic, and panic brings cruelty in its train. So long as the state was
+weak, it was cruel; and the hideous treason-laws of Tudor times were
+due to fear. The weak cannot afford to be tolerant any more than the
+poor can afford to be generous. Cecil thought that the state could not
+afford to tolerate two forms of religion; to-day it tolerates hundreds,
+and it laughs at treason because it is strong. We are humanitarian, not
+because we are so much better than our ancestors, but because we can
+afford the luxury of dissent and conscientious objections so much
+better than they could. Political liberty and religious freedom depend
+upon the power of the state, inspired, controlled, and guided by the
+mind of the community.
+
+Last of all, through this power man has acquired faith, not in
+miraculous intervention, but in his capacity to work out his own
+destinies by means of the weapons placed in his hands and the dominion
+put under his feet. He no longer believes that the weakest must go to
+the wall, and the helpless be trampled under foot in the march of
+civilization; nature is no longer a mass of inscrutable, iron decrees,
+but a treasury of forces to be tamed and used in the redemption of
+mankind by man; and mankind is no longer a mob of blind victims to
+panic and passion, but a more or less orderly host marching on to more
+or less definite goals. The individual, however, can do little by
+himself; he needs the strength of union for his herculean tasks; and he
+has found that union in the state. It is not an engine of tyranny, but
+the lever of social morality; and the function of English government is
+not merely to embody the organized might and the executive brain of
+England, but also to enforce its collective and coordinating
+conscience.
+
+
+
+
+CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
+
+
+B.C. 55. Julius Caesar's first invasion of Britain.
+A.D. 43-110. Roman occupation of Britain.
+410-577. Period of Anglo-Saxon colonization and conquest.
+597-664. Conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity.
+617-685. Northumbrian supremacy.
+685-825. Mercian supremacy.
+8O2-839. Ecgberht establishes West Saxon supremacy.
+855. Danes first winter in England.
+878. Peace of Wedmore between Alfred and the Danes.
+900 (?). Death of Alfred.
+9OO (?)-975. Edward the Elder, Athelstan, and Edgar. Reconquest of the
+      Danelaw.
+978-1013. Ethelred the Unready. Return of the Danes.
+1016. Edmund Ironside.
+1016-1035. Canute.
+1042.-1060. Edward the Confessor and the growth of Norman Influence.
+1066. Harold and the Battle of Hastings. WILLIAM I.
+1066-1071. The Norman Conquest. Submergence of the Anglo-Saxons.
+1085-1086. Domesday Book. The Salisbury Oath.
+1087-1100. WILLIAM II.
+1100-1135. HENRY I and the beginnings of an administrative system. The
+      Exchequer and _Curia Regis_.
+1135-1154. STEPHEN and Matilda. The period of baronial independence,
+     _i.e._ anarchy.
+1154-1189. HENRY II restores order, curbs the military power of the
+      barons by scutage (1159), the Assize of Arms (1181), and the
+      substitution of sworn inquest for the ordeal and trial by battle,
+      and their jurisdiction by the development of the royal court of
+      justice through assizes of Clarendon, Northampton, etc. Teaches
+      the people to rely on their judgment. Restrains the sheriffs, and
+      attempts to limit ecclesiastical jurisdiction by the
+      constitutions of Clarendon (1164). Quarrel with Becket.
+1189-1199. RICHARD I. Crusade and wars In France.
+1199-1210. JOHN'S tyranny. Loss of Normandy (1204). Quarrel with the
+      church and baronage. Tries to retrieve his position by spirited
+      foreign policy. Defeated at Bouvines (1214) and forced to sign
+      Magna Carta (1215).
+1216-1272. HENRY III. Beginnings of national government under De Burgh.
+      Naval victory (1217). Alien domination of Henry's favourites
+      provokes baronial resistance. Growth of native wealth and
+      influence, and of an English party in the Barons' War (1258-
+      1265). Simon De Montfort. Townsfolk summoned to Parliament.
+1272-1307. EDWARD I, the first English king since the Norman Conquest.
+      Emergence of the English people, their language, national
+      weapons, towns, commerce. The Model Parliament(1275, 1295).
+      Confirmation of the charters(1297). National resistance to the
+      Papacy, and  national enterprises against Wales and Scotland.
+1307-1327. EDWARD II. The relapse of Monarchy. Baronage becoming
+      peerage. Thomas of Lancaster.
+1327-1377. EDWARD III. Growth of nationalism in religion, politics,
+      literature, trade, and war. The Commons take the constitutional
+      lead abandoned by the peers. Lollardy and hostility to the
+      Papacy. Decay of manorial system: emancipation of villeins:
+      growth of  industry and towns.
+1377-1399. RICHARD II, Revolt of the peasants and artisans (1381).
+      Tries to emancipate himself from the control of the peers, and is
+      deposed.
+1399-1413. HENRY IV and the Lancastrian dynasty. Revolt of the Percies
+      (1403). Henry's troubles with over-mighty subjects.
+1413-1422. HENRY V seeks escape from domestic troubles in foreign war.
+1415. Battle of Agincourt. Treaty of Troyes (1420).
+1422. HENRY VI. Rivalry between Beaufort and Gloucester leads to growth
+      of Lancastrian and Yorkist factions, and these with local anarchy
+      produce the Wars of the Roses (1455-1485).
+1461. EDWARD IV secures the throne, and in 1471 defeats both the
+      Lancastrians and Warwick the King-maker.
+1483. RICHARD III.
+1485. HENRY VII and the House of Tudor.
+1487. Organization of the Star Chamber to repress disorder and over-
+      mighty subjects. Diaz doubles the Cape of Good Hope.
+1492. Columbus discovers West Indies.
+1496-1497. Cabot discovers Newfoundland and Labrador.
+1509. HENRY VIII.
+1512-1529. Wolsey.
+1529-1536. The Reformation Parliament. The submission of the Clergy,
+      Acts of Annates, Appeals (1532-1533) and Supremacy (1534).
+1536. Suppression of the Monasteries and Pilgrimage for Grace.
+1539. Act of Six Articles.
+1547-1553. EDWARD VI and the Protestant Reformation.
+1549. First Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer. Kett's
+      rebellion.
+1552. Second Act of Uniformity and Book of Common Prayer.
+1553-1558. MARY and the Roman Catholic reaction. Spanish control in
+      England.
+1558. ELIZABETH.
+1559. The Elizabethan settlement of religion.
+1560. Elizabeth assists the Scots to expel the French.
+1568-1569. Flight of Mary Queen of Scots into England, and rebellion of
+      the northern earls.
+1570. Papal excommunication and deposition of Elizabeth.
+1571. Ridolfi's plot.
+1572. Execution of Norfolk and extinction of English dukedoms.
+      Beginning of the Dutch Republic. Massacre of St. Bartholomew.
+1577-1580. Drake sails round the world.
+1587. Execution of Mary Queen of Scots.
+1588. Spanish Armada.
+1599-1601. Conquest of Ireland.
+1600. Foundation of East India Company.
+1603. JAMES VI of Scotland and I of England.
+1607. Foundation of Virginia.
+1608. Plantation of Ulster.
+1620. Sailing of the Mayflower.
+1623. Re-creation of dukedoms. Massacre of Amboyna.
+1625. CHARLES I.
+1628. Petition of Right.
+1629. First British capture of Quebec.
+1629-1640. The "Eleven Years' Tyranny."
+1638-1639. National Covenant. Bishops' war in Scotland.
+1640. The Long Parliament.
+1642. First Civil War.
+1648. Second Civil War.
+1649. THE COMMONWEALTH. Abolition of monarchy and the House of Lords.
+1650-1651. Navigation Acts and Dutch War.
+1653. THE PROTECTORATE. First Cromwellian constitution.
+1657. Second Cromwellian constitution.
+1658. Cromwell's death.
+1660. The Restoration. CHARLES II.
+1662. The last Act of Uniformity.
+1664. War with the Dutch: conquest of New Netherlands
+1667. Fall of Clarendon. The Cabal administration.
+1670. Treaty of Dover.
+1672. Declaration of Indulgence.
+1673. Danby. The Test Act.
+1678. Titus Gates' Plot.
+1679. Habeas Corpus Act.
+1681. Charles II's triumph over the Whigs.
+1685. JAMES II. Monmouth's and Argyll's rebellions.
+1688. The Revolution. WILLIAM III and MARY.
+1689. Bill of Rights. Toleration Act.
+1690. Battle of the Boyne.
+1694. Bank of England established.
+1696. The Whig _Junto_.
+1701. Act of Settlement.
+1702. ANNE. War with France.
+1704. Capture of Gibraltar. England becomes a Mediterranean power.
+1707. Act of Union with Scotland.
+1708. Capture of Minorca.
+1708-1710. Whig ministry.
+1710-1714. Tory ministry.
+1713. Peace of Utrecht.
+1714. GEORGE I and the Hanoverian dynasty.
+1721-1742. Walpole's administration. Evolution of the Cabinet and Prime
+      Minister. Growth of imports and exports,
+1727. GEORGE II.
+1739. War with Spain.
+1741-1748. War of the Austrian Succession. Clive in India.
+1756-1763. Seven Years' War.
+1757. Battle of Plassey.
+1759. Capture of Quebec.
+1760. GEORGE III.
+1764-1779. Inventions by Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton. Beginning
+      of the Industrial Revolution.
+1765. Grenville's Stamp Act.
+1770. Lord North Prime Minister. Captain Cook surveys Australia and New
+      Zealand.
+1774. The Quebec Act.
+1776. Declaration of American Independence. Adam Smith's _Wealth of
+      Nations_.
+1778-1779. France and Spain join the Americans.
+1780. The "Armed Neutrality." Warren Hastings saves India.
+1781. Fall of Yorktown.
+1782. Volunteer movement In Ireland. Irish parliamentary independence.
+1783. American Independence granted.
+1784. Pitt Prime Minister: his India Bill.
+1788. Convict settlement in Australia.
+1789. French Revolution.
+1791. The Canadian Constitutional Act.
+1794. The "Glorious First of June."
+1795-1796. Conquest of the Cape and of Ceylon.
+1797. Battles of St. Vincent and Camperdown.
+1798. Battle of the Nile. Irish rebellion.
+1799. Wellesley in India. Capture of Seringapatam. Partition of Mysore
+      and the Carnatic.
+1800. Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Seizure of Malta.
+1801. Battle of Copenhagen.
+1802. Peace of Amiens.
+1803. Battles of Assye and Argaum. Defeat of the Mahrattas.
+1805. Battle of Trafalgar.
+1806. Second capture of the Cape.
+1808-1814. Peninsular War.
+1810. Capture of Mauritius.
+1812-1814. War with the United States.
+1814. Corn Laws passed.
+1815. Battle of Waterloo.
+1820. GEORGE IV.
+1825. Huskisson's Tariff Reform.
+1827. Battle of Navarino.
+1828. Corn Laws revised.
+1828-1829. Repeal of Test Act. Roman Catholic Emancipation.
+1830. WILLIAM IV. Whigs return to power.
+1832. First Reform Act. Representative Government established in
+      Newfoundland.
+1834-1835. Reform of the Poor Law and Municipal corporations.
+1837. QUEEN VICTORIA. Mackenzie and Papineau's rebellions in Canada.
+      Great Boer "trek."
+1840. Annexation of New Zealand.
+1841-1846. Peel's Free Trade policy.
+1842. Representative government in Australia.
+1846. Corn Laws repealed.
+1848. Responsible self-government In Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova
+      Scotia.
+1849. Repeal of the Navigation Acts.
+1852. Responsible government developed In Australia and New Zealand.
+1853. Representative government in Cape Colony.
+1854-1856. Crimean War.
+1855. Responsible government in Newfoundland. 1856. Representative
+      government in Natal.
+1857. Indian Mutiny.
+1858. Transference of India to the Crown.
+1867. Disraeli's Reform Act. Federation of the Dominion of Canada.
+1869. Disestablishment of the Irish Church. Opening of the Suez Canal.
+1870. Compulsory education.
+1872. Abolition of purchase in the army by executive action.
+      Responsible government in Cape Colony.
+1876. Queen proclaimed Empress of India.
+1876-1877. Russo-Turkish War. Dual control established in Egypt.
+      Annexation of the Transvaal.
+1881. Transvaal granted independence.
+1882. British administration of Egypt begins.
+1885. Fall of Khartoum. Gladstone's Reform Act. Annexation of Burma.
+1887. Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria, and Italy.
+1889. Establishment of County Councils.
+1890. Free Education. Franco-Russian _entente_. Responsible
+      government in Western Australia.
+1893. Responsible government in Natal.
+1894. Establishment of district and parish councils.
+1895. Jameson Raid.
+1896-1898. Reconquest of the Sudan.
+1899-1903. The Great Boer War.
+1900. Establishment of the Australian Commonwealth.
+1901. EDWARD VII.
+1904. Russo-Japanese War.
+1905. Anglo-Japanese alliance.
+1906-1907. Responsible government granted to the Transvaal and Orange
+      River Colonies.
+1909. The Union of South Africa.
+1910. GEORGE V.
+1911. Asquith's Parliament Act. Capital of India transferred from
+      Calcutta to Delhi. Beginnings of National Insurance.
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+
+J. R. GREEN'S _Short History of the English People_ (Macmillan), and C.
+R. L. FLETCHER'S _Introductory History of England_, 4 vols. (Murray),
+both eminently readable in very different styles, illustrate the
+diverse methods of treatment to which English history lends itself.
+More elaborate surveys are provided by LONGMANS' _Political History of
+England_, 12 vols. (edited by W. Hunt and R. L. Poole), and METHUEN'S
+_History of England_, 7 vols. (edited by C. Oman).
+
+The student of Constitutional History should begin with F. W.
+MAITLAND'S _Lectures on Constitutional History_ (Cambridge University
+Press), and for a compendium of facts may use Medley's _Constitutional
+History of England_ (Blackwell).
+
+Periods can be studied in greater detail in--J. R. GREEN: _The Making
+of England_ and _The Conquest of England_ (Macmillan). FREEMAN: _Norman
+Conquest,_ 6 vols., and _William Rufus_, 2 vols. (Oxford University
+Press). NORGATE: _England under the Angevins_, 2 vols., and _John
+Lackland_ (Macmillan). RAMSAY: _Lancaster and York_, 2 vols. FROUDE:
+_History of England_, 1529-1588, 12 vols. (Longmans). GARDINER:
+_History of England_, 1603-1642, 10 vols.; _Civil War_, 1642-1649, 4
+vols.; _Commonwealth and Protectorate_, 1649-1656, 4 vols. (Longmans).
+MACAULAY: _History of England_, 1685-1702 (Longmans). LECKY: _History
+of England_, 1714-1793, 7 vols.; _Ireland_, 1714-1800, 5 vols.
+(Longmans). SPENCER WALPOLE: _History of England_, 1815-1846, 6 vols.
+HERBERT PAUL: _History of Modern England_, 1846-1895, 5 vols.
+(Macmillan). MORLEY: _Life of Gladstone_, 2 vols. (Macmillan).
+
+English Constitutional History is detailed in--STUBBS: _Constitutional
+History to 1485_, 3 vols. (Oxford University Press). HALLAM:
+_Constitutional History_, 1485-1760, 3 vols. (Murray). ERSKINE MAY:
+_Constitutional History,_ 1760-1860, 3 vols. (Longmans). ANSON: _Law
+and Custom of the Constitution,_ 3 vols. (Oxford University Press).
+DICEY: _Custom of the Constitution_ (Macmillan).
+
+For Ecclesiastical History see STEPHENS and HUNT'S _History of the
+Church of England,_ 7 vols. (Macmillan); for Colonial History, SEELEY'S
+_Expansion of England_ (Macmillan), and _The British Empire_ (ed.
+Pollard; League of the Empire); for Economic and Industrial History,
+CUNNINGHAM'S _Growth of Industry and Commerce_, 3 vols.; ASHLEY'S
+_Economic History_, 2 vols. (Macmillan), and TOYNBEE'S _Industrial
+Revolution_; for sketches of movements and biographies, see MACAULAY'S
+_Essays_ (Longmans), STUBB'S _Lectures on Mediaeval and Modern History_
+(Oxford University Press), and POLLARD'S _Factors in Modern History_
+(Constable).
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The History of England, by A. F. Pollard
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND ***
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