up the cause of Naboth against his King. The old power of the Church, which was spiritual, had ceased to exist; and the connection between Church and religion was almost entirely formal. Of faith and enthusiasm there was little indeed. And it was but natural that the parson, having ceased to be the spiritual father of his parish, should lose his power, and sink into a position of subservience to the squire. The eighteenth-century parson, from the glimpses we catch of him, seems to have been a good fellow on the whole; sometimes a kindly and learned gentleman; more often a hard-riding sportsman, with a fondness for his bottle and bodily comfort generally, but with no more idea of taking up his cross, or being born again into the life of Christ, than he had of flying. That such a man would do anything except swim with the stream is not to be believed. This is the age of the Vicar of Bray.

It would be the height of absurdity to speak as if there were any deep-laid or cynical conspiracy on the part of the upper class against their inferiors, or anything at all equivalent to the nobbling of the corporations by Charles II. If there was tyranny, it must be granted that it was little understood, or even realized by its victims. On the contrary, the Englishman, like. Voltaire's boatman, was never tired of contrasting his own freedom and prosperity with the hard lot of foreign slaves, and particularly Frenchmen. "Popery and wooden shoes" had been bracketed together by the London mob, who believed Oates. Nor was this prejudice altogether devoid of foundation. Voltaire was struck by the material prosperity of the English peasant as compared with his French compeer; by his ability to improve his small property without being bled to death for it, and by the number of prosperous English farmers. Such comparisons were to be a favourite theme for the pictorial satire of Hogarth.

In many respects the English upper class seems to have

been more worthy of respect than that of any other nation. If they had power, they at least worked for it. They lived, for the most part, on their estates, and understood, and were understood by, their dependents. Sir Roger de Coverley represents a type inconceivable in any land less fortunate than our own. A Squire Western may have been ignorant and brutal, but the hearty old fellow, with his farmer's accent and prejudices, and more than a farmer's eye for the run of a fox, was, beyond all comparison, a more popular and efficient kind of landowner than the magnificent Marquis de Carabas, who only saw, or was allowed to see, his estate at very rare intervals, and who regarded it principally as a means of extorting money for his pleasures at Versailles. Moreover, unjust and pedantic as English Law might be, there was a majesty about it, something of the spirit of old Coke, which prevented it from being formally or cynically regardless of justice. This was, in part, the result of that provision of the Act of Settlement which removed the judges from the influence of the Crown. When, at the very worst period of class ascendancy, Lord Ferrers was so bold as to murder his servant, not all the influence of his title and connections could keep him from the gallows, nor from the added shame of being dissected afterwards, like any cutpurse or highwayman. There were, in England, none of those flagrant exemptions from taxation on the part of the well-to-do, which played such a part in bringing about the French Revolution.

If our Revolution did nothing, of itself, to strengthen the power of the people, there were still means through which that power could find expression, though crudely, and at intervals. It so happened that London, which was the centre of government, was also the most turbulent, and politically active part of the kingdom. It was a masterpiece of tactics for Charles II to have arranged for his political coup d'état at Oxford, and not at London,

The London mob was still able to strike terror into a Government, which could not, or dared not, as yet, call out the troops to shoot them down. When, by a reversal of their traditional bias, they shouted for the Church and Sacheverell, their hoarse roar penetrated the fastness of the Upper Chamber and paralysed the judges. It was a wave of popular feeling upon which William relied, at the end of his reign, to return him a majority favourable to the war, and his confidence was not misplaced. This sensitiveness of the rulers to the popular mood did not increase, to say the least of it, during the eighteenth century, except when quickened by the genius of Chatham. It was possible for Pitt the younger, and Liverpool, to set popular opinion at defiance in a way that would have been impossible for William, or even Walpole.

It is no less significant than interesting to examine the theory by which its apologists sought to justify the Revolution. The task devolved upon Locke, who was, by general consent, the Whig philosopher par excellence. The hesitating and inconsistent nature of his philosophy we shall have occasion to notice hereafter, merely remarking here that it is in keeping with his politics. Like the statesman who brought over William, he was, above all things, an advocate of compromise. Few treatises are less inspiring than his "Discourse on Civil Government," and yet it is worth noticing that, as Spinoza's dry and Euclidean ethics were the delight of the young Goethe, so this unemotional pamphlet was capable of awakening enthusiasm in the breast of Chatham.

Locke proceeds to construct his State upon the same lines as Hobbes. What he does is, in effect, to take his predecessor's theory, and see how, by patching and alteration, it can be made to suit the purposes of the Whigs and William III. His natural man is a more respectable person than Hobbes' graceless free-lance. He is blessed with a sense of meum and tuum, and bears

the Law of Nature written in his breast. But he finds that it will be more convenient, on the whole, for him to enter into some sort of definite association with his neighbours, and that for certain specified reasons. “The great and chief end," says Locke, "of men uniting in commonwealths . . . is the preservation of their property." This is in the true spirit of an age in which commerce was to draw policy in its train, and in which the law, though it might be merciful to violence, avenged with deadly severity the theft of a sheep or the firing of a rick.

The natural man, therefore, consents to the formation of a society wielding executive, legislative, and judicial powers, nicely divided and balanced. However, there may come a point at which the inconveniences of such a contract outweigh its benefits, and hence arises the right of resistance. It may be observed that there is nothing in all this calling for more sentiment than does the formation of any business partnership. Locke's dry reasoning does not admit of patriotic enthusiasm, or pride of history, still less of any mystic sanction from above. Our author displays no slight controversial shrewdness in devoting the first part of his Discourse to a dissection of Filmer's silly apology for Divine Right. Indeed, Filmer understood as little as Locke, the depth and import of a reverence which was only weakened by narrowing it to the person of a king. That was for Burke to discover anew.

There appears in Locke a new trend of thought, of which we shall hear much during the Prose Age. The natural love of the Motherland was put into competition with a theoretical attachment to the world at large. Cosmopolitan doctrines have ever been of the head rather than of the heart, and humanity in the abstract is a thing that most men would sooner discuss than die for. In almost his only passage, which is at all tinged with emotion,

Locke states that the end of government is the good of mankind.

Such was the philosophy of the Revolution; a cold, material, balanced piece of reasoning, ominous of the years to come. It was little merit in such an evangelist that he was an upholder of Toleration, for he could ill have understood the motives which drove men like St. Bernard to persecute, or men like Cromwell to forbear. Much less respectable than the philosopher of the Revolution were its statesmen. Trained in the school of the Restoration, they had, for the most part, such liberal views of morality that they did not stick at corresponding with William under James, and with James under William. The best of them were men like Somers, cautious, trimming tacticians, fertile in expedients, but with a real fund of patriotism. Such men were the exceptions, and a diminishing minority. More characteristic of the time is the essentially modern type of Harley and Godolphin, the man acquainted with every shift and turn of the party game, capable of infinite non-committal, and labouring with unwearied diligence for his own. advancement, not from any lust to control the destinies of men, but because office and titles are comfortable things to have.

Hardly had William been seated on the throne, than the nation found itself faced by a crisis, which called out all that was noblest in it. To call over William of Orange was, indeed, equivalent to committing England to the struggle with Louis. Of this struggle William was the embodiment; to this cause his life was devoted. Perhaps we might even go a step further, and say that in this cause he had sacrificed his soul. There is something inhuman about him; if he is among the most admirable, he is also among the least amiable of mankind. He had drilled himself almost into a machine, fit to crush his gigantic adversary. To ordinary human morality he