blindly prejudiced. The reformed Parliaments, newly reformed more than once since 1832, have worked far better than the opponents of reform expected; but in the minds of many competent judges it is still an open question whether as agents of government they have worked so well as the Parliaments which came before. The old system, where a great gentleman often carried half a dozen boroughs in his pocket, made it easy to find a seat in the House for any young man of promise; to go no further, it was to this system that we owe the parliamentary career of Burke. There can be little doubt that with the progress of democratic temper in England the House of Commons has tended personally to deteriorate. No doubt there are aspects in which the new system seems more just than the old; but there are aspects, too, in which the old seems to have been the safer. Such speculations as this, however, are fruitless; the Reform Bill is a fact; and the thing for us to remark about it is that this virtual revolution in England was accomplished constitutionally. In brief, what happened was this. The House of Lords, the more conservative chamber of Parliament, was unprepared to pass the Reform Bill; the House of Commons, representing, it believed, the ardent conviction of the country, was determined that the Bill should be passed. Thereupon the King was persuaded to inform the Lords that in case they persisted in voting against the measure he should create new peers enough to make a majority of the House. This threat brought the conservative peers to terms. They did not vote for the measure, but under the leadership of the Duke of Wellington they walked out of the house in silent protest. A revolutionary threat on the part of the King had accomplished under constitutional forms a peaceful revolution.

Five years later King William IV. was dead. Then began the reign of the most tenderly human sovereign in English history. For sixty-two years, in the full blaze of public life, she has unfalteringly done what she has deemed her duty.

This devoted conscientiousness has strengthened English royalty beyond words. Through sixty years of growing democracy the fact that the throne of England has been filled by Queen Victoria has gone far to re-establish in popular esteem a form of government which it is the fashion to call a thing of the

past.

In general this Victorian era has been peaceful, but still one which is best typified by the newest title of its sovereign. For during the last sixty years of the nineteenth century England has been quietly asserting itself no longer as an isolated kingdom, but as a world-empire. This imperialism of England seems different from any other which has declared itself since the pristine empire of Rome. It stands not for the assertion of central and despotic authority, but rather for the maintenance of those legal traditions which evince the elasticity of still unbroken vitality. For, speaking broadly, the English Common Law is a system, not of rules, but of principles. Its fundamental notion is that the world should be governed by established custom. So long as its influence was confined to the island where it was developed, to be sure, it still seemed impracticably rigid. The American Revolution, however, taught England a lesson which has been thoroughly learned, that when English authority asserts itself in foreign regions, the true spirit of the Common Law should recognise and maintain all local customs which do not conflict with public good. In India, for example, local custom sanctioned many things essentially abominable, — murder, self-immolation, and the like. Such crimes against civilisation the English power has condemned and repressed. Harmless local custom, on the other hand, — freedom of worship, peculiarities of land tenure, and whatever harmonises with public order, the English government has maintained as strenuously as in England itself it has maintained the customs peculiar to the mother country. So in Canada it has maintained a hundred forms of old French law ancestral to those provinces. So in

Australia it has maintained many new systems and customs which have grown up in a colony settled since the American Revolution. Its modern state is typified by the fact that in the judicial committee of the Privy Council - whose functions resemble those of the Supreme Court of the United States there are now regularly members from Canada, from India, from Australia, to pronounce in this court of appeal on questions referred to the mother country from parts of the empire where the actual law differs from that of England herself.

The Victorian epoch, then, has begun to explain the true spirit of the English law: whatever the letter, this spirit maintains that throughout the empire, and all the places where the imperial influence extends, the whole force of England shall sustain the differing rights and traditions which have proved themselves, for the regions where they have grown, sound, safe, and favourable to civilised prosperity. The growing flexibility of English government has tended to make dominant in many parts of the world the language and the ideals which we share with England. The progress of imperial England, then, frequently misrepresented, as though it were mere selfish aggression, is really a phase of a world-conflict which the acceleration of intercommunication steam travel and the electric telegraph has at last made inevitable. yond doubt war is terrible; one of our own generals in the Civil War is said to have declared that "War is Hell." At least to the traditional American mind, however, hell hardly yet presents itself as a thing which unaided human ingenuity can certainly avoid; and when war means that the progress of the moral, legal, and political ideals which we share with England either must be checked or must dominate by armed force, minds loyal to our ancestral traditions may fairly begin to question whether tame peace is not worse still.

Be

Historically, then, England began the century as an isolated conservative power. In the reign of King William IV. it

underwent a revolution which its ancestral legal forms proved strong and flexible enough to accomplish without convulsion or bloodshed; and during the long reign of Queen Victoria it has been more and more widely asserting the imperial dominion of the flexibly vital traditions of our Common Law.

II

ENGLISH LITERATURE SINCE 1800

So we come to the literature of England during the nineteenth century. By chance several dates which we have named for other purposes are significant in literary history as well as in political. In 1798, when Nelson fought the battle of the Nile, Wordsworth and Coleridge published their famous volume of "Lyrical Ballads." This little book is commonly regarded as the first important expression of that romantic outburst of poetry which substituted for the formal literary traditions of the eighteenth century those traditions of individual artistic freedom which have persisted until the present time. In brief, the literary emancipation of England, amid blind political conservatism, was almost as marked as the literary conservatism of France, amid revolutionary political changes. The spirit of revolution was everywhere abroad; but in England it more profoundly influenced phrase than conduct, while in France the case was just the reverse. In 1832, the year of the Reform Bill, Scott died; Byron, Shelley, and Keats were already dead; so was Miss Austen; and every literary reputation contemporary with theirs was finally established.

Broadly speaking, the period of English literature which began with the "Lyrical Ballads" and ended with the death of Scott may be divided at 1815, the year of Waterloo. The chief expression which preceded this was a passionate outburst of romantic poetry, maintaining in widely various forms the revolutionary principle that the individual, freed from accidental and conventional trammels, may be trusted to tend toward righteousness; that human nature is not essentially evil but excellent; and that sin, evil, and pain are brought into being