conformists. In the next reign, the Anglicans gained fresh powers of harassing those who had carried out most thoroughly the principles of the Reformation. To an act of terrible severity against the Catholics, provisions were attached, to use the words of a British historian, that "if, on the death of a Protestant land-owner, the Protestant next of kin, to whom the estate would lapse, happened to be a Presbyterian, he was to be passed over in favor of a more remote member of the establishment. The English test act was introduced as a parenthesis. The Presbyterians, the Independents, the Huguenot immigrants, the Quakers, were swept under the same political disabilities, and were cut off from the army, the militia, the civil service, the commission of the peace, and from seats in the municipal corporations." But the English revolution at least accepted from the Puritans and Presbyterians the doctrine of the right of resistance to tyranny, the cherished principle of liberty, familiar in the middle ages to the feudal nobles of every monarchy in Europe, and now transmitted as an inheritance to the great supporters of the Reformation. The commons of England, by a vast majority, declared the executive power to be a conditional trust; and the hereditary assembly of patricians, struggling in vain for the acknowledgment of a right of succession inherent in birth, after earnest debates, submitted to confess an original contract between king and people. The election of William III. to be king for life was a triumph of the perseverance of the more popular party in the commons over the inherited prejudices of the high aristocracy. In this lies the democratic tendency that won to the revolution the scattered remnant of "the good old" republicans; this appropriated to the whigs the glory of the change, in which they took pride, and of which the tories regretted the necessity. This has commended to the friends of freedom the epoch in which the great European world beheld a successful insurrection against legitimacy and authority over mind.

By resolving that James II. had abdicated, the represen tatives of the English people assumed to sit in judgment on its kings. By declaring the throne vacant, they annihilated

the principle of legitimacy. By disfranchising a dynasty for professing the Roman faith, they not only exerted the power of interpreting the original contract, but of introducing into it new conditions. By electing a king, they made themselves the fountain of sovereignty. His civil list was settled by them at his accession for his life; but all other supplies were granted by them annually and made subject to specific appropriations.

The royal prerogative of a veto on the acts of parliament soon fell into disuse. The dispensing power was expressly abrogated, or denied. The judiciary was rendered independent of the crown; so that charters were safe against executive interference, and state trials ceased to be collisions between blood-thirsty hatred and despair. For England, parliament was absolute.

The progress of civilization had gradually elevated the commercial classes, and given importance to towns. Among those engaged in commerce, in which the ancient patricians had no share, the spirit of liberty became active, and was quickened by the cupidity which sought new benefits for trade through political influence. The day for shouting liberty and equality had not come; the cry was "Liberty and property." Wealth became a power in the state; and when, at elections, the country people were first invited to seek other representatives than the large landholders, it was not the leveller or the republican, but the merchant, or a candidate in the interest of the merchant, who taught the timid electors their first lessons in independence.

Moreover, as the expense of wars soon exceeded the revenue of England, the government prepared to avail itself of the largest credit. The price of such aid was political influence. That the government should protect commerce and domestic manufactures, that the classes benefited by this policy should sustain the government with all their resources, was the reciprocal relation and compromise, on which rested the fate of parties in England. The accumulations and floating credits of commerce soon grew powerful enough to compete with the landed interest. The imposing spectacle of the introduction of the citizens

and of commerce as the arbiter of alliances, the umpire of factions, the judge of war and peace, roused the attention of speculative men; so that, in a few years, Bolingbroke, claiming to speak for the landed aristocracy, described his opponents as the party of the banks, the commercial corporations, and, "in general, the moneyed interest;" and Addison, espousing the cause of the burghers, declared nothing to be more reasonable than that "those who have engrossed the riches of the nation should have the management of its public treasure, and the direction of its fleets and armies." In a word, the old English aristocracy was compelled to respect the innovating element imbodied in the moneyed interest.

Still more revolutionary was the political theory developed by the revolution. Absolute monarchy was denied to be a form of civil government. Nothing, it was held, can bind freemen to obey any government save their own agreement. Political power is a trust; and a breach of the trust dissolves the obligation to allegiance. The supreme power is the legislature, to whose guardianship it has been sacredly and unalterably delegated. By the fundamental law of property, no taxes may be levied on the people but by its own act or that of its authorized agents.

The revolution is further marked as a consequence of public opinion, effected without bloodshed in favor of the strongest conviction. It refused to confirm itself by force, and would not tolerate standing armies. It compelled William III. to dismiss his Dutch guards. A free discussion of the national policy and its agents was more and more demanded and permitted. The English government, which used to punish censure of its measures or its ministers with merciless severity, began to lean on public conviction. The whigs could not consistently restrain debate; the tories, from their interests as a minority, desired freedom to appeal to popular sympathy; and the adherents of the fallen dynasty loved to multiply complaints against impious usurpation. All were clamorous for liberty; and Jacobites and patriots could frame a coalition. It was no longer possible to set limits to the active spirit of inquiry

The philosophy of Locke, cherishing the variety that is always the first fruit of analysis and free research, was admired, even though it seemed to endanger some dogmas of the church, of which the denial was still by the statutes a crime. Men not only dissented from the unity of faith, but even denied the reality of faith; and philosophy, passing from the ideal world to the actual, claimed the right of observing, weighing, measuring, and doubting, at its will. The established censorship of the press, by its own limitation, drew near its end, and, after a short renewal, was suffered to expire, never again to be revived. England enjoyed the liberty of unlicensed printing. If prosecutions for libels still continued, the demand for the freedom of the press, was already irresistible. Its force was in creased by the unlimited freedom of parliamentary debate, the freedom of elections, and the right of petition, which belonged to every Englishman. "In the Revolution of 1688, there was certainly no appeal to the people." In the contest between the nation and the throne, the aristocracy constituted itself the mediating lawgiver, and made privilege the bulwark of the commons against despotism. The free press carried political discussions everywhere. By slow degrees, a popular opinion would gather a consciousness of existence. By slow degrees, the common people would gain hardihood enough to present petitions; to come together for the consideration of public grievances. If the aristocracy refused to abdicate the control of parliament; if Lord Somers did not propose a reform of boroughs, such as the people of that day had not learned to desire, the liberty of unlicensed printing opened an avenue for diffusing political instruction, and was a pledge of the ultimate concession of reform.

Thus the Revolution of 1688, though narrow in its principle, imperfect in its details, ungrateful towards Puritans, frightfully intolerant towards Catholics, forms an era in the history of England and of mankind. Henceforward the title of the king to the crown was bound up with the title of the aristocracy to its privileges, of the people to its liberties: it sprung from the nation, and not from

a power superior to the nation; from law, and not from divine right; and its responsibility was therefore not to God alone, but to God and the nation. The revolution respected existing possessions, yet made conquests for freedom; preserved the ascendency of the aristocracy, yet increased the weight of the middling class; the securities of personal liberty, of opinion, and of the press; and the responsibility of the executive. England became the star of constitutional government, shining as a beacon on the horizon of Europe, and, in the heart of despotic countries, compelling the eulogies of Montesquieu and the homage of Voltaire. Never in the history of man had so large a state been blessed with institutions so favorable to public happiness, to the arts of peace, to the development of its natural resources. Its commerce connected it with every quarter of the globe; and its colonies were so many pledges that the whole race would participate in the benefit of her freedom and her culture.

When the revolution was effected, the statesmen of England had no plan for administering the colonies. The new king and his ministers, without knowledge of their condition or experience in their affairs, were now swayed by the principles of liberty, now eager to strengthen the prerogative, and they often followed the precedents and usages of the previous reign.

1689.

To the proprietaries of Carolina, the respect of the revolution for vested rights secured their possessions. In the territory itself, south and west of Cape Fear, political parties had already become passionate, if they had not acquired consistency. Of "the pretended churchmen" who! were among the early emigrants, some were known as "ill livers," having the manners of the time of Charles II. The larger part of the settlers were dissenters, bringing with them the faith and the staid sobriety of the Calvinists of that age. At first, "the ill livers,' averse to restraint, opposed the proprietaries, whose government the grave Presbyterians, as friends to order, sustained. When the obstinate perversity of the proprietaries drove the Presbyterians into opposition, those who were styled "the nobil