EX BIBLIOTHECA 
 FRANCES A. YATES 
 
HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 OF MODERN KNOWLEDGE 
 
 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 Bv A. F. POLLARD, M.A., Litt.D. 
 
 London 
 
 WILLIAMS & NORGATE 
 
 HENRY HOLT Sc Co., New York 
 Canada : WM. BRIGGS, Toronto 
 India : R. & T WASHBOURNE, Ltd. 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Ed/ton : 
 HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 
 
 Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, D.LlTT., 
 LL.D., F.B.A. 
 
 Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 
 
 Prof. WILLIAM T. BREWSTER, M.A. 
 (Columbia University, U.S.A.) 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 
 
THE HISTORY 
 OF ENGLAND 
 
 A STUDY 
 IN POLITICAL EVOLUTION 
 
 BY 
 
 A. F. POLLARD, 
 
 M.A., LiiT.D. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH HISTORY IN 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON*, 
 FELLOW OF ALL SOULS' COLLEGE, OXFORD ; 
 AUTHOK OF *' FACTORS IN iMODKRN 
 HISTORY," "henry VIII," ETC. 
 
 i 
 
 IL.. 
 
 LONDON 
 
 WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 
 
Richard Ci.ky 6c Sons, Limited, 
 brunswick street, stamford street, a.b., 
 and bunoay, suffolk. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CnA.P. PACK 
 
 I THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND, 55 B,C.- 
 
 A.D. 106G ... . . 7 
 
 II THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND, 106G- 
 
 1272 3i 
 
 in EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE, 
 
 1272-1485 CO 
 
 IV THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM, 1485- 
 
 1G03 87 
 
 V THE STRUGGLE FOR SELF-GOVERNMENT, 
 
 1603-1815 IIG 
 
 VI THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND, 1603-1815 . 149 
 
 VII THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION . . .173 
 
 VIII A CENTURY OF EMPIRE, 1815-1911. . 199 
 
 IX ENGLISH DEMOCRACY .... 225 
 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE . . . .248 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..... 253 
 
 INDEX 255 
 
 V 
 
THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 con- 
 quered 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 his- 
 torical 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 
 
 7 
 
8 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 thresh- 
 old of understanding without realizing that 
 our national achievement has been the out- 
 come 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 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 9 
 
 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 them- 
 selves 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 Ccesar's two 
 raids in 65 B.C. and 54 B.C. left no permanent 
 results, the conquest was soon completed 
 when the Romans came in earnest in a.d. 48. 
 
 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 
 
10 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 inter- 
 ests 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 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 11 
 
 more British, it was due to the weakness and 
 not to the poHcy of the imperial govern- 
 ment. 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 dismem.ber 
 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 estab- 
 lished 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 in- 
 vitation from the British chief Vortigern to 
 
12 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 pro- 
 phetic call to the sea and the setting sun. 
 
 This migration by sea is a strange pheno- 
 menon. 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 under- 
 stand. 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 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 13 
 
 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 numer- 
 ous southern neighbours, the Angles and 
 Saxons ; and the torrent of conquest grew in 
 volume and rapidity. Invaders by sea natur- 
 ally 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 
 
14 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 king- 
 doms, 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. 
 X 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 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 15 
 
 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 whole- 
 sale 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 con- 
 tact with tougher rivals than the Britons. The 
 expansion of Sussex and Kent was checked 
 by Saxons who had landed in Essex or ad- 
 vanced up the Thames and the Itchen ; East 
 Anglia was hemmed in by tribes who had sailed 
 up the Wash, the Humber, and their tribu- 
 taries; and the three great kingdoms which 
 emerged out of the anarchy — Northumbria, 
 
16 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 hinter- 
 land. Scotland taxed for centuries the 
 assimilative capacity of united England; it 
 was too much for Northumbria to digest. 
 Northumbrians 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 Caed- 
 mon 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 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 17 
 
 military prowess it could not absorb a hinter- 
 land 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, de- 
 veloped 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 threat- 
 ened 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 
 
 B 
 
18 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 Ecg- 
 berht'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 pre- 
 decessors ; 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 Guth- 
 rum. 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 pacify- 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 19 
 
 ing influence of Christianity. Not the least 
 of Alfred's gains was the destruction of 
 Mercia's unity ; its roj^al house had dis- 
 appeared 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 
 Mcrcia. His children, Edward the Elder 
 and Ethelfleda, the Lady of the Mercians, and 
 his grandson Athelstan, pushed on the expan- 
 sion of Wessex thus begun, dividing the land 
 as they won it into shires, each with a burh 
 (borough) or fortified centre for its militarj'- 
 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 achieve- 
 ment by several hundred years. Edgar could 
 do no more than evade difficulties and tempor- 
 ize with problems which imperceptible growth 
 
20 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 aristo- 
 cracy 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 
 
 4 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 21 
 
 (Witan), and only those were wise whose 
 wisdom was apparent to the king. Com- 
 munity 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 bar- 
 barians 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 end- 
 less degrees of inequality in wealth ; some 
 now owned but a fraction of what had been 
 
22 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 com- 
 munity 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 govern- 
 ment 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 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 23 
 
 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 land- 
 lord'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 some- 
 
24 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 times 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 responsibihty 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 worth- 
 less as a member of a frith-borh, for the law 
 had httle hold over a man who had no land to 
 forfeit and no fixed habitation. So the land- 
 less man was compelled by law to submit 
 to a lord, who was held responsible for the 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 25 
 
 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 
 I 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 inter- 
 ests centred round the village green ; the 
 ** best " men travelled further afield to the 
 
26 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 hundred and shire-moot, but anything beyond 
 these hmits was distant and unreal, the affair 
 of an outside world with which they had no 
 concern. Anglo-Saxon patriotism never tran- 
 scended provincial boundaries. 
 
 The government, on the other hand, pos- 
 sessed 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 high- 
 ways, 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 adminis- 
 tration ; but its organization was still monas- 
 tic 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 impos- 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 27 
 
 sible to enforce royal protection adequately, 
 or to check the centrifugal tendency of 
 England to break up into its component 
 I parts. The monarchy was a man rather 
 S 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 absorp- 
 tion. 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 incur- 
 
28 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 able 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-carls to 
 terrify local magnates and enforce obedience 
 to the English laws which he re-enacted. 
 His division of England into four great earl- 
 doms 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 
 
THE FOUNDATIONS OF ENGLAND 29 
 
 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 North- 
 umbrians, who regarded him, and were regarded 
 
80 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 hi which 
 the soundest elements were already Danish. 
 The stoutest resistance, not only in the 
 mihtary 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 
 f elsewhere; and the reflection that, had the 
 English re-conquest of the Danelaw been more 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 31 
 
 * 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 
 
32 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 
 v/ent 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.'! 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 33 
 
 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 dis- 
 covered 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 civiliza- 
 tion tended to obliterate local and class divi- 
 sions. 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 
 
34 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 was the great contribution of the Normans 
 to the making of England. They had no 
 written law of their own, but to secure them- 
 selves 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 con- 
 querors by the iron hand of William and by 
 their situation amid a hostile people. 
 
 The problem for William and his com- 
 panions was how to organize this military 
 superiority as a means of orderly government, 
 and this problem wore a twofold aspect. 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 35 
 
 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 
 humorously 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 generaliza- 
 tions 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; 
 
30 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 manu- 
 tactures, 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 mJght be either a 
 layman or an ecclesiastic, had to render this 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 37 
 
 military service to the king, while the sub- 
 tenants had to render it to tenants-in-ehief. 
 When the tenant died, his Iarid>xeverted 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 re- 
 tained 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, 
 
38 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 differ- 
 ent 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 SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 39 
 
 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 Dane- 
 geld, which William imposed after the Domes- 
 day 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 organ- 
 ization 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 
 conunon in continental feudalism; and if he 
 did, it was only by special royal grant, and he 
 was gradually deprived of it by the develop- 
 
40 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 ment of royal courts of justice, which drew 
 to themselves large parts of manorial juris- 
 diction. 
 
 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 irnposed 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 primogeni- 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 41 
 
 ture were among the strongest of feudal ten- 
 dencies. Primogeniture had proved poHtically 
 advantageous ; and one of the best things in 
 the Anglo-Saxon monarchy had been its avoid- 
 ance 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 powder, 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. 
 
42 THE HISTORY OF 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 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 43 
 
 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 
 
 1 
 
44 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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, mag- 
 nify its law, exalt its privileges, and assert 
 that to it belonged principally the right to 
 
 1 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 45 
 
 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 
 <l 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, proclaim- 
 ing his intention of restoring good old laws. 
 This reaction brought him up against the en- 
 croachments of the church, and the untoward 
 incident of Becket's murder impaired the 
 success of Henry's efforts to establish royal 
 
46 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 supremacy. But this supremacy must not 
 be exaggerated. Henry did not usurp ecclesi- 
 astical 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 feuda- 
 tories 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 SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 47 
 
 the feudatories. He cashiered all the sheriffs 
 at once, to explode their pretensions to heredi- 
 tary 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 mili- 
 tary expert were thus superseded by the 
 verdicts of peaceful citizens. 
 
 This method, which was extended to 
 criminal as well as civil cases, of ascertain- 
 ing 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 Provi- 
 dence or the priests. Each party to a 
 dispute had been required to produce oath- 
 helpers or compurgators and each compur- 
 gator's oath was valued according to his 
 
48 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 property, just as the number of a man's 
 votes is still proportioned to some extent to 
 his possessions. But if, as commonly hap- 
 pened, 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 
 I 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 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 49 
 
 already been specialized as the exchequer 
 by the Norman kings, who had reaUzed 
 that finance is the first essential of efficient 
 government. From finance Henry I had 
 gone on to the administration of justice, 
 J 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 trans- 
 formed it from an occasional assembly of 
 warUke barons into a regular court of trained 
 lawyers — mere servants of the royal house- 
 hold, the barons called them; and by means 
 of justices in eyre he brought it into touch 
 with all localities in the kingdom, and con- 
 vinced his people that there was a king who 
 meant to govern with their help. 
 
 D 
 
50 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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, 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 51 
 
 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 absorb- 
 ing imports. The very watchwords of pro- 
 gress and catchwords of liberty, from the 
 trial by jury w^hich 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 founda- 
 tions 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 con- 
 
52 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 quered 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 plaus- 
 ible 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 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 53 
 
 gain, and none went entirely unrewarded 
 from Runnymede. But if Sir Henry Spel- 
 man 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 
 
54 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 a liberty " was that through its enjoy- 
 ment you were not as other men; the 
 barons would have cared 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. 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 55 
 
 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 theniselves, 
 the right to tallage their villeins as arbi- 
 trarily 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, 
 
56 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 West- 
 minster, for standard weights and measures, 
 for the administration of law by men ac- 
 quainted 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 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 57 
 
 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 w^hen.. 
 in the reign of Henry III, a papal legati% 
 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 nation- 
 ality, and so far there was no sign of English 
 indignation at the bartering of England's inde- 
 pendence. 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 
 
58 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 6ver 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 
 
 « 
 
THE SUBMERGENCE OF ENGLAND 59 
 
 anarchy. But there was this difference be- 
 tween the anarchy of Stephen's reign and that 
 of Henry Ill's : now, when the foreigners 
 fell out, the EngUsh 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, 
 v/ho copied his tactics at Evesham, copied 
 his politics in 1275 and afterwards at West- 
 minster; and under the first sovereign since 
 the Norman Conquest who bore an English 
 
CO THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 name, the English people received their 
 national livery and the seisin of their inherit- 
 ance. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE 
 
 1272-1485 
 
 In 1265, simultaneously with the appear- 
 ance of English tovmsfolk in parliament, an 
 official document couched in the English 
 tongue appeared like a first peak above the sub- 
 siding flood of foreign language. When, three 
 generations back. Abbot Samson had preached 
 English sermons, they were noted as excep- 
 tions ; 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 
 
 1 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 61 
 
 never accommodated itself to this agricultural 
 system, and the growth of trade, of towns, of 
 other forms of wealth than land, tended con- 
 currently to break down French and feudal 
 domination. A large number of towns had 
 been granted, or rather sold, charters by 
 Richard I and JTohn, not because those 
 monarchs were interested in municipal de- 
 velopment, 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 govern- 
 ment, they did not necessarily promote popu- 
 lar 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 con- 
 sequent 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 
 
62 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 gradually gave way to oligarchy and corrup- 
 tion. Nevertheless, these local bodies were 
 English, and legally their members had been 
 villeins ; and their experience in local govern- 
 ment prepared them for admittance to that 
 share in national government which the develop- 
 ment of taxation made almost necessary. 
 
 Henry II's scheme of active and comprehen- 
 sive 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 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 63 
 
 to a popular demand for national self-govern- 
 ment. When in 1791 a beneficent British 
 parliament granted a popular assembly to 
 the French Canadians, they looked askance 
 and muttered, Oest une machine Anglaise 
 pour nous taxer " ; and Edward I's people would 
 have been justified in entertaining the sus- 
 picion 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 con- 
 stituents 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 
 
64 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 impera- 
 tive, 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 out- 
 laws. 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 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 65 
 
 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 
 
 E 
 
66 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 side by side with earls and prelates in the 
 great council of the realm is the most signi- 
 ficant fact of thirteenth-century English 
 history. The people of England were begin- 
 ning 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 
 ki his Welsh wars that the long-bow was 
 more efficient than the weapons of the knight ; 
 and his grandson won English victories at 
 Cre9y 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 under- 
 mined. They took to trade, or, at least, to 
 money-making out of land, like ordinary 
 citizens, and thus entered into a competition 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 67 
 
 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 
 
68 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 through- 
 out 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 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 69 
 
 of Erxglishmen 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 
 
70 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 a growing national spirit not altogether unlike 
 that upon which Edward himself relied in 
 England. Nor was English patriotism suffi- 
 ciently developed to counteract the sectional 
 feelings which took advantage of the king's 
 embarrassments. The king's necessity was 
 his subjects' opportunity, and the Confirma- 
 tion 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 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 71 
 
 which he fostered were soon to make irre- 
 parable 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 
 
72 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 w^as grow- 
 ing 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 feuda.1 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 73 
 
 levy; the national long-bow and not the 
 feudal war-horse won the battles of Cre^y and 
 Poitiers; and command of the sea secured 
 by a national navy enabled Edward to win 
 the victory of Sluys and complete the reduc- 
 tion 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 promi- 
 nence. 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 Comm.ons 
 represented the communities of the realm, and 
 
74 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 not its lower orders ; or rather, it concen- 
 trated 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 de- 
 veloped 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 con- 
 stitutional liberty. 
 
 Most of the principles and expedients of 
 representative government were adumbrated 
 during this first flush of English national- 
 ism, 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 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 75 
 
 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 inde- 
 pendent 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 limi- 
 tations of papal power. Early in Edward Ill's 
 
76 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 reign a claim was made that the king, in 
 virtue of his anointing at coronation, could 
 exercise spiritual jurisdiction, and the statutes 
 of Prcemunire 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 instru- 
 ment 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 com- 
 bined 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 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 77 
 
 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 wxre 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 repre- 
 sented this national feeling when he appealed 
 
78 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 to national authority to reform a corrupt 
 Catholic church, and when he finally denied 
 ^ that power of miraculous transubstantiation, 
 I upon which ultimately was based the claim 
 I of the priesthood to special privileges and 
 estimation. But his association with the 
 extreme forms of social agitation which accom- 
 panied the Lollard movement is less clear. 
 
 Before the end of Edward Ill'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 
 ni'^asures 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 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 79 
 
 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 grand- 
 father in 1377, reaped the whirlwind of 
 Edward's sowing, not so much in the conse- 
 quences 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 etymo- 
 logical 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 arch- 
 bishops, dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, 
 bishops, and barons, of peers who are lords 
 
80 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 compara- 
 tively small men, while the peers of Richard 
 II were a small class of big men. The mass 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 81 
 
 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. 
 
 JBut 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 four- 
 teenth century by the knights of the shire. 
 The greater barons devoted themselves rather 
 
82 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 11, 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 
 f 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 Wood- 
 stock 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 vis* 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 83 
 
 counts, 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 
 
84 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 
 Ill's to the throne of France. There were 
 temptations in the hopeless condition of 
 French affairs which no one but a states- 
 man could have resisted; Henry, a brilliant 
 soldier and a bigoted churchman, was any- 
 thing 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, 
 
EMERGENCE OF THE ENGLISH 85 
 
 with nothing but success in the impossible 
 task of subduing France to save the Lancas- 
 trian dynasty from the nemesis of vaulting am- 
 bition 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 govern- 
 ment resolved itself into a faction fight be- 
 tween Lancastrians and Yorkists. The conse- 
 quent impotence of the government provoked 
 a bastard feudal anarchy, maintained by hire- 
 lings instead of liegemen. Local factions fought 
 with no respect for the law, which was adminis- 
 tered, 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 
 
86 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 Ill'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 domi- 
 nated Germany. Certainly the defeat of these 
 forces was a victory for southern and eastern 
 England, and for the commercial and marl- 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 87 
 
 time interests on v/hich 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 king- 
 
 ^ maker, 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 PROGHESS OF NATIONALISM 
 
 1485-1603 
 
 England had passed through the Middle 
 Ages without giving any sign of the greatness 
 
 4 
 
88 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 which awaited its future development. Ed- 
 ward 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 imme- 
 diately 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 inspira- 
 tion ; 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 
 entrepots 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 revolu- 
 tionized the social and financial foundations 
 of pov/er. National states were forming ; the 
 
 1 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 89 
 
 state which could best adapt itself to these 
 changed and changing conditions would out- 
 distance its rivals ; and its capacity to adapt 
 itself to them would largely depend on the 
 strength and flexibility of its national organiza- 
 tion. 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, unos- 
 tentatious 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 fight- 
 ing a battle abroad. His foreign policy was 
 dictated by insular interests regardless of per- 
 sonal 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 overmighty subjects 
 
90 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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, pack- 
 ing 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 ecclesias- 
 tics 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 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 91 
 
 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. 
 
92 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 dis- 
 integration, 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 reli- 
 gious orders, the parliamentary authorization 
 of services in the vernacular, of English books 
 of Common Prayer, of EngHsh 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. 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 93 
 
 There were, indeed^ no legal raeans by which 
 the church in England could have accom- 
 plished 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. 
 Tlie 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 catho- 
 licity, while the state at best was only 
 national. It was in defence of the catholicity, 
 
 1 
 
94 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 Eliza- 
 beth 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 success- 
 fully 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; parlia- 
 ment 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 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 95 
 
 against the church ; and men complained 
 that despotic authority had merely been 
 transferred from the pope to the king, and 
 infalhbility from the church to pariiament. 
 " Parliament," wrote an Elizabethan states- 
 man, " 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 cur- 
 rents 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 
 
96 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 re- 
 placed the sacerdotal solo, and a communion 
 w^as substituted for a priestly miracle. Reli- 
 gious service was to be something rendered by 
 the people themselves, and not performed for 
 their benefit by the priest. 
 Individual participation and private judg- 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 97 
 
 ment 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, how- 
 ever, been less the expression of the general 
 will than the discipline by authority of 
 masses too illiterate to think for them- 
 selves. 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 ver- 
 nacular 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 pohtical 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 emanci- 
 pation of men's minds from the materialism 
 
 G 
 
 1 
 
98 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 dis- 
 tinct 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 juris- 
 prudence had confessed its inability to pene- 
 trate 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 con- 
 veyance, 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 docu- 
 ments all could read, while few could read the 
 
 1 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 99 
 
 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 with- 
 out 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 immaterial- 
 I istic 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. Protestant- 
 ism 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 
 
100 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 and illiterate Catholics : the point is that the 
 somewhat crude symbolism which had satis- 
 fied the cravings of the average man had 
 ceased to be sufficient for his newer intelli- 
 gent needs; he demanded either a higher 
 i 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 ot 
 the nation. But the devotion of the proceeds 
 to the foundation of private families, instead 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 101 
 
 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 govern- 
 ment. 
 
 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 com- 
 
102 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 petition 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 high- 
 handed 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 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 103 
 
 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 Eng- 
 land for the moment back into the Middle 
 Ages. First she put herself and her kingdom 
 under the a^gis of Spain, to which in heart and 
 mind she belonged, by marrjang Philip II. 
 Then with his assistance she restored the papal 
 jurisdiction, and England surrendered its 
 national independence. Those who repudi- 
 ated 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 reigu 
 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 im- 
 possible for any successor to perpetuate in 
 
104 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 England the Roman jurisdiction and the 
 patronage of Spain. 
 
 Elizabeth was a sovereign more pm'ely 
 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, 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 105 
 
 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 adaptabiHty 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 
 
106 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 Con- 
 tinent, 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 
 f the traders, robbery being a thoroughly 
 * genteel occupation. Hence foreign govern- 
 ments were, as a rule, less alive and less re- 
 sponsive 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 com- 
 mercial 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 rejec- 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 107 
 
 tion 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, 
 I 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 administra- 
 tion was mainly due to these recruits, whose 
 genius would have been elsewhere neglected. 
 Further, it provided the government with 
 
108 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 agents peculiarly fitted by training and know- 
 ledge to deal with the commercial problems 
 which were beginning to fill so large a sphere 
 in politics ; and finally, it rendered the govern- 
 ment 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 en- 
 couraged 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 pro- 
 hibition made many converts to Protestantism 
 among English seafaring folk. Even Mary 
 could not prevent her subjects from preying 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 109 
 
 on Spanish and Portuguese commerce and 
 colonies ; and with Elizabeth's accession prey- 
 ing grew into a national pastime. Hawkins 
 broke into Spanish monopoly in the West 
 Indies, Drake burst into their Pacific pre- 
 serves, 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 tra- 
 ditions, Spain had failed to realize the condi- 
 tions 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 
 
 i 
 
110 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 111 
 
 the foundations of empire, produce the litera- 
 ture 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 reaction- 
 aries 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 antagon- 
 ism 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 
 
 1 
 
112 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 th^ 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 Nether- 
 lands. 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 
 
THE PROGRESb OF NATIONALISM 113 
 
 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 ineffici- 
 ency 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 con- 
 tinued 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 
 
 H 
 
114 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 ex- 
 pression in parliament and in popular litera- 
 ture. In all forms of literature, but especially 
 in the Shakespearean drama, the keynote of 
 
THE PROGRESS OF NATIONALISM 115 
 
 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 mon- 
 archy 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 mono- 
 polies, 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 
 
116 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 with the growing security of national inde- 
 pendence. People could afford the luxuries 
 of libert}' 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 differ- 
 ent 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 
 
 ,1 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 117 
 
 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 pre- 
 pared to tolerate in him many things which, 
 on account of her age and sex, it had over- 
 looked in Elizabeth. 
 
 Parliament began the constitutional conflict 
 thus foreshadowed with no clear constitu- 
 tional 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 
 
118 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 un- 
 fitness 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, Provi- 
 dence had not merely ordained the king de 
 factOy 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 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 119 
 
 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 Reforma- 
 tion 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 parlia- 
 mentary opposition and obscured the historical 
 justification for many of James's claims. 
 Historically, there was much more to be said 
 
120 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 for the contention that parliament existed by 
 grace of the monarchy than for the counter- 
 claim that the monarchy existed by grace of 
 parliament ; and for the plea that parlia- 
 ment 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 
 j arbitrary acts could not be justified by pre- 
 ^ cedent, 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 parlia- 
 ments. The main cause of dissatisfaction 
 was the growing popular conviction that con- 
 stitutional 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 parlia- 
 ment was driven to insist upon its privileges 
 and upon an alternative theory to that of 
 James I. 
 
 1 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 121 
 
 This alternative theory was difficult to 
 elaborate. There was no idea of democraev. 
 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 
 
122 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 I constitution is that there are always a number 
 I 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 parlia- 
 mentary privilege nor develop its own prero- 
 gative without parliamentary sanction; and 
 it read this assumption back into history. 
 Nothing was legal unless it had been sanc- 
 tioned 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 constitu- 
 tion, including the crown itself ; even parlia- 
 ment 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 
 
 n 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 123 
 
 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 con- 
 sider 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 
 
124 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 normal customs duties) for one year after his 
 accession instead of for life. Charles con- 
 tended 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 with- 
 out 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 v/ithout parliament, 
 raising supplies by various obsolete expedients 
 culminating in ship m.oney, 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 exist- 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 125 
 
 ence 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 un- 
 fettered 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 adminis- 
 tration. Charles had ruled eleven years with- 
 out 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 
 
126 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 weathered the storm and let parliament sub- 
 side 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 in- 
 divisible ; peace could not be kept between a 
 sovereign legislature and a sovereign execu- 
 tive; parliament must control the crown, or 
 some day the eleven years would recur and 
 become perpetual. In France, unparlia- 
 mentary 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. 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 127 
 
 In such a contest for the control of the exe- 
 cutive 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, at- 
 taches to the fact that the abeyance of mon- 
 archical 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 epi- 
 
128 THE HISTORY OF tJNULAND 
 
 demic 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 pay- 
 ment 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 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 129 
 
 v/ould have been carried to extremes, as the 
 victary of the Roundheads was ; and the re- 
 sult would almost certainly have been despotic 
 government until a still more violent out- 
 break precipitated the country into a series 
 of revolutions. 
 
 Liberty, like rehgious toleration, has been 
 won through the internecine warfare between 
 various forms of despotism ; and the strength 
 of the Royalists lay in the fact that parlia- 
 ment, in espousing Presbyterianism, weighted 
 its cause with an ecclesiastical system as 
 narrow and tyrannical as Laud's. New pres- 
 byter was but old priest writ large, and the 
 balance between the two gave the decision 
 into the hands of the Lidependents, whose 
 numerical inferiority was redeemed by Crom- 
 well'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 
 I 
 
130 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 deter- 
 mined 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 redis- 
 tribution 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 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 131 
 
 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 cham- 
 ber 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 restora- 
 tion 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. 
 
132 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 The church secured the most sectarian of its 
 various settlements, and the narrowness of 
 its re-estabhshment 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 parlia- 
 ments 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 re- 
 storing the Star Chamber and the other 
 prerogative courts and councils which had 
 enabled the crown to dispense with parlia- 
 mentary and common law control ; and 
 
SELF-GOVERN^IENT 
 
 133 
 
 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 eman- 
 cipation of the Roman Catholics from their 
 position of pohtical 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 incom- 
 patible. 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 Declara- 
 tions of Indulgence for Roman Catholics and 
 Dissenters (1672), and sought to secure him- 
 
134 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 self 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 him- 
 self to the task of emancipating the crown 
 from parliamentary interference. But popu- 
 lar 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 mon- 
 strous 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 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 135 
 
 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, Shaftes- 
 bury fled to Holland, and Sidney and Russell 
 were brought to the block; their parlia- 
 mentary 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 
 
136 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 repre- 
 sentatives 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 nega- 
 tive 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 mea- 
 sures 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, 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 137 
 
 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 ParKament, 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, 
 f But all these enactments were safeguards 
 against the abuse of royal power and infringe- 
 ment 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 reli- 
 gious 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 guaran- 
 
138 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 teed 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 precipi- 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 130 
 
 tate 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 follov/ed 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 stru^jgle with 
 Louis XIV, required a constant stream of 
 
140 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 prin- 
 cipal 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 w^ars; 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 con- 
 sidered 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 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 141 
 
 took its place. They wanted a Stuart restora- 
 tion, even at the price of undoing theRevohi- 
 tion, 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 
 
142 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 to- 
 gether without the king and tendered collec- 
 tive 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 competi- 
 tors 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 insti- 
 tutions. Similarly the cabinet itself grew and 
 was not created by any Act; indeed, while 
 the cabinet and the prime minister were grow- 
 ing, 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 con- 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 143 
 
 stitution to grow and adapt itself to circum- 
 stances 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 oiffice, 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 effici- 
 ency, 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. 
 
144 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 Ostensibly and constitutionally the disputes 
 have been between the two Houses of Parlia- 
 ment; and this was readily 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 centurv, 
 and the extremes to which they sometimes 
 pushed their claims suggest that they were as 
 anxious as the crown had been to place them- 
 selves 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 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 
 
 143 
 
 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 parlia- 
 ment (1547) for which journals of the Com- 
 mons proved w^orth 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; 
 
 K 
 
146 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 
 
 f 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 develop- 
 ment 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 wTite, 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 
 
SELF-GOVERNMENT 147 
 
 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 irra- 
 tional 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 dis- 
 appeared, 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 
 
148 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 hberty 
 sometimes sank to the level of those of a feudal 
 baron. 
 
 Hence the comparative ease and success 
 v*^ith which George III filled its sacred precincts 
 w^ith 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 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 149 
 
 The influence of the crown, it resolved in 1780, 
 had increased, was increasing, and ought to 
 be diminished. But it could only be dimin- 
 ished 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 Avell 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 In- 
 dustrial Revolution had changed the face of 
 England did the old political forces acknow- 
 ledge 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. 
 
150 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 ajid 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 EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 151 
 
 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 co- 
 operation between the two peoples, and it was 
 followed by a great deal more. The planta- 
 tion of Ulster by English and Scots after the 
 flight of the Irish earls of Tyrone and Tyrcon- 
 nell 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 May- 
 -flower 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 somethinf; 
 in common between them ; the Puritans, too, 
 wanted uniformity, and believed in their right 
 
 1 
 
152 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 Inde- 
 pendent 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 town- 
 ships, 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 im- 
 portant 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. 
 
THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 153 
 
 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 Eliza- 
 bethan 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 mon- 
 archies 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 
 
154 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 " massacre " of Englishmen at Amboyna in 
 1623, after which the EngKsh 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 carry- 
 ing 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 pro- 
 ducing 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 Navi- 
 gation Acts was reaffirmed, with some modifi- 
 cations, after the Restoration, which made no 
 difference to England's commercial and colo- 
 nial 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 
 
 1 
 
THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 155 
 
 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 Mary- 
 land, 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 settle- 
 ment 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 Eng- 
 land'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 
 
156 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 pos- 
 session 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 recog- 
 nition of the Old Pretender, were blows at 
 the heart of the empire. Moderate success on 
 James's part might have led to its dismember- 
 ment, 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 
 
THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 157 
 
 her independent parliament and administra- 
 tion.: 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 seven- 
 teenth 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 
 
158 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 Terri- 
 tories, 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 Wal- 
 pole'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, Alex- 
 ander, 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 
 
THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 159 
 
 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, per- 
 haps, was almost as much the brilliant adven- 
 turer as Dupleix, but he was supported at need 
 by an organized government more susceptible 
 than the French ancien regime to the pressure 
 of commercial interests and of popular ambi- 
 tions. 
 
160 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 be- 
 tween 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 re- 
 stored ; 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 
 
THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 161 
 
 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 colo- 
 ( nists. Grenville was incapable of such states- 
 manlike obliquity. He tried to stop smug- 
 gling ; 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 w^ere 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 
 
 L 
 
162 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 \ 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 
 
THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 163 
 
 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 pre- 
 cedents 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 states- 
 manship. 
 
 The English people supported George III 
 until he had failed; but there was not much 
 enthusiasm for the war, except at places hke 
 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 
 
104 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 suc- 
 cessful defence of Gibraltar (1779-1783) enabled 
 her to obtain tolerable terms from her Euro- 
 pean 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 equa- 
 nimity 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 nioral 
 indignation was sharpened by resentment at 
 
THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 165 
 
 the use of Anglo-Indian gold to defeat them 
 at the general election of 1784. Ireland was 
 placated by the grant of legislative indepen- 
 dence (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 govern- 
 ment, a divided people — such was the verdict 
 of a contemporary politician. At length, after 
 a Protestant revolt in Ulster, a Catholic rising 
 
166 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 
 
THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND ICT 
 
 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 strong- 
 holds 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 mone- 
 tary 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, 
 
168 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 Ameri- 
 can 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 rehgion (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 somewhat 
 discordant elements by dividing Canada into 
 two provinces, one predominantly French, the 
 
THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 169 
 
 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 warlike 
 operations, were sent to explore the Pacific; 
 and, among them. Captain James Cook sur- 
 veyed 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-coun- 
 try wanted to avoid the convicts ; but in 
 neither case was there any imperialism in 
 the aversion. 
 II India was, in fact, the chief outlet at that 
 f 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 
 
170 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 of British government. But so had Frederick 
 the Great begun his career by writing a refuta- 
 tion of Machiavelli ; circumstances, and some- 
 thing within which made for empire, proved 
 too strong for Uberal intentions, and the only- 
 British war waged between the Peace of 
 Versailles in 1783 and the rupture with Revo- 
 lutionary France in 1793 resulted in the dis- 
 memberment 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 con- 
 firmed 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 Camper- 
 down 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 occu- 
 
THE EXPANSION OF ENGLAND 171 
 
 pied as a stepping-stone to India, and Malta 
 was seized (1800) with a similar object. Mau- 
 ritius, 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 redun- 
 dantly 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 
 
172 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 moun- 
 tainous 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 appro- 
 priate their colonies ; and so South America 
 
 4 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 173 
 
 was left to work out its destinies under Latin 
 and not Teutonic influence. Most of the West 
 Indian islands, however, with British Hon- 
 duras 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 cen- 
 tury ; 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 in- 
 vented 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 
 
 1 
 
174 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 agri- 
 cultural and an industrial stage of develop- 
 ment ; 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 re- 
 corded English history begins. Each of these 
 stages corresponds to a different social organ- 
 ization : the pastoral stage was patriarchal, 
 the agricultural stage was feudal, the com- 
 mercial stage was plutocratic, and the in- 
 dustrial stage leads towards democracy. The 
 stages, of course, overlap one another, and 
 every national community to-day is partly 
 pastoral, partly agricultural, partly com- 
 mercial, and partly industrial. We can only 
 call a nation any one of these things in 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 175 
 
 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, pro- 
 viding 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 manu- 
 factures. 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 with- 
 out 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 
 
176 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 wood. This family independence long sur- 
 vived, and home-brewing, home-baking, home- 
 washing, are not even now extinct. Each 
 family in the primitive village did every- 
 thing 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 men- 
 tioned 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. 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 177 
 
 Thus village industries grew up, and in 
 unprogressive countries, such as India, where, 
 owing to distance and lack of communica- 
 tions, 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 in- 
 dustries, 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 speciahza- 
 tion 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 
 
 M 
 
178 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 more and more specializing in some one or 
 more industries, leaving the great majority 
 of their needs to be supphed 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 dow^n under the stress 
 of these changes; a middle class, consisting 
 of neither lords nor villeins, was needed to 
 cope with industry and commerce. Hand- 
 workers 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 modem 
 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 in- 
 crease. There is little to choose between a 
 slow runner and a swift when the race covers 
 only ten "^ards ; there is more when it covers 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 179 
 
 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 destitu- 
 tion; 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, 
 
180 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 some its oil, and some do its carrying trade. 
 It is now a qviestion 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 everytliing it wants itself it 
 will neither sell to, nor buj^ 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 invest- 
 ment, 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 
 
 .a 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 181 
 
 of privateers, despoiling the church, Spain, 
 Ireland, and often the commonwealth itself. 
 Scores of acts against fraudulent manu- 
 facturers 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 to- 
 day 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 manu- 
 facturer 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 
 
182 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 undoubt- 
 edly unsound, if the amount of wealth pro- 
 duced 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 in- 
 closures but by making them legal, provided 
 that " sufficient commons were left; if the 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 183 
 
 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 some- 
 thing 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 embank- 
 ing; 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 
 
184 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 tobacco, tea, coffee, cocoa, sugar, rum, spices, 
 oranges, lemons, raisins, currants, silks, cotton, 
 rice, and others with which England had pre- 
 viously 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 w^hen 
 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 cate- 
 gorically 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, 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 185 
 
 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 be- 
 tween 1764 and 1779 a series of inventions by 
 Arkwright, Hargreaves, and Crompton, trans- 
 
186 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 formed 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 manu- 
 facturing centres. Their locality was, how- 
 ever, 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 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 187 
 
 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, Stephen- 
 son developed the steam locomotive, and the 
 railway system came into existence. 
 
 Closely connected with these changes was 
 a renew^al 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 con- 
 sequent upon the industrial revolution ; while 
 the agricultural labourer gave up spinning 
 
188 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 under the stress of factory competition, the 
 spinner deserted his cottage and four acres in 
 the country, to seek a dweUing near the 
 factory which employed him; and the Eliza- 
 bethan 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 in- 
 closure 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 pro- 
 gressive 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 INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 189 
 
 the manufacturing centres because iron was 
 smelted with wood and not with coal. Now 
 that c<oal was substituted for wood, the juxta- 
 position 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 supple- 
 menting the beggarly wages of the labourers 
 
190 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 prole- 
 tariate 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 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 191 
 
 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 dis- 
 franchised a number of poor voters, but en- 
 franctfised 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 
 
192 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 par- 
 ticular, 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 land- 
 lords, whose rents depended ultimately upon 
 the price of corn, demanded protection corre- 
 sponding to that which extensive tariffs on 
 imported articles gave to the manufacturers. 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 193 
 
 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 prefer- 
 ence 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 1845-1846 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 
 
 N 
 
194 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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^. 8d. in 1828 when the 
 price was 62^. 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 re- 
 sult 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, im- 
 posing 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, 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 195 
 
 whose Wealth of Nations appeared in 1776, 
 reduced and simplified these duties; but 443 
 Acts istill 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 im- 
 posed for the sake of revenue, and to protect 
 neither the consumer from the export of com- 
 modities he desires to purchase, nor the 
 manufacturer from the import of those he 
 
 1 
 
196 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 wishes to make. The great interests con- 
 nected 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 pro- 
 tected produce of the landlords and the 
 farmers. The repeal of the Navigation Acts 
 rounded ofi the system; British shipping, 
 indeed, needed no protection, but the ad- 
 mission 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 imcon- 
 scious, 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 
 
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 197 
 
 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 special- 
 ist'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 psycho- 
 logical 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 machin- 
 ery, requires recreation and distraction : 
 naturally he is a prey to unwholesome stimu- 
 lants, such as drink, betting, or the yellow 
 press. The more educated and morally re- 
 strained, however, seek intellectual stimulus, 
 and the modern popular demand for culture 
 
198 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 ex- 
 torted by their votes. Neither the Evangelical 
 nor the Oxford movement proved any pro- 
 phylactic against the immorality of commercial 
 and industrial creeds. While those two re- 
 ligious 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 
 I main-drainage, his risks from infection, and 
 , the purity of his food and his water-supply. 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 199 
 
 The old system of local government was 
 utterly inadequate and ill adapted to the new 
 conditions; and the social and physical en- 
 vironment of the working classes was a dis- 
 grace to civilization pending the reconstruction 
 of society, still incomplete, which the In- 
 dustrial 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 develop- 
 ment of the empire and the problems which 
 
200 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 prin- 
 ciples 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 inter- 
 vention assisted the South American colonies 
 to assert their independence of the Spanish 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 201 
 
 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, 
 j Russia was the bugbear of two generations 
 I 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 
 
202 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 the fate which the modern barbarian of the 
 north was to inflict upon the British heirs of 
 I 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 intro- 
 duced a fresh complication. Relations be- 
 tween England and France had since Waterloo 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 208 
 
 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 suppres- 
 sion 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 
 
204 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 produced the entente cordiale between France 
 and Russia in 1890. Fortunately, the danger- 
 ous 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 
 i 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 else- 
 where in former times the subject races 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 205 
 
 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 convert- 
 ing Brahmans, Mohammedans, Parsees to a 
 common Christianity or by undermining their 
 attachment to their particular distinctions. 
 They have built railways and canals, which 
 
206 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 made communieations and contact unavoid- 
 able; 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 responsi- 
 bility. At present, caste and racial and 
 religious differences, especially between Mo- 
 hammedans 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 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 207 
 
 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 consider- 
 ation that we do to white men. 
 
 So far as the white population of the empire 
 
208 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 is concerned, the problem of self-government 
 was solved in the nineteenth century by pro- 
 cedure 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 repre- 
 sentative 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 outgrow- 
 ing 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 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 209 
 
 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 West- 
 ern 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, 
 o 
 
210 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 Hotten- 
 tot 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 Trans- 
 vaal. 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 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 211 
 
 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 govern- 
 ments, 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 Indepen- 
 dence had taught the mother- country the 
 necessity of granting complete self-govern- 
 ment to her colonies is a persistent miscon- 
 ception; 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 Indepen- 
 dence. 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 recom- 
 mendation, which ultimately proved unwork- 
 
212 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 able, 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 govern- 
 ment. 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 w^as 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-govern- 
 ment on most of the empire's oversea domin- 
 ions. 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 
 
 ■i 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 213 
 
 constitution for itself, comprising two legis- 
 lative 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 responsi- 
 bility 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-govern- 
 ment 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 t'Aeir 
 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 
 
214 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 Transvaal had been annexed in 1877, had 
 rebelled, and had been granted almost com- 
 plete 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 adven- 
 turers, 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 th« 
 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 Uit- 
 landers, and armed himself to resist the argu- 
 
 1 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 215 
 
 ments of the British government on their 
 behalf. Both sides under-estimated the deter- 
 mination and resources of the other. But 
 Kruger was more ignorant, if not more obsti- 
 nate, 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. 
 
216 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 but nowhere outside the United Kingdom 
 hereditary. Their members are either nomi- 
 nated by the prime minister for Hfe, 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 Common- 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 217 
 
 wealth, 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 Anti- 
 podes women share with men the privilege of 
 adult suffrage in New Zealand, in the Common- 
 wealth 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 
 
218 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 rail- 
 ways and denationalized all churches and 
 religious instruction in public schools. There 
 is, indeed, no state church in the empire out- 
 side 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 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 219 
 
 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 pro- 
 vincial 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 un- 
 workable 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. Con- 
 siderable 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 
 
 1 
 
220 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 govern- 
 ment, 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 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 221 
 
 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 legis- 
 lature, and the difficulty of apportioning their 
 powers, determined South African states- 
 men to sweep away the old legislatures alto- 
 gether, and to establish a united parliament 
 which meets at Cape Town, a single executive 
 which has its offices at Pretoria, and a judica- 
 ture 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, 
 
222 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 New Zealand, and South Africa has strength- 
 ened 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 
 
A CENTURY OF EMPIRE 223 
 
 educated, there needs must be an aristocracy. 
 Great Britain lost its American colonies largely 
 through ignorance ; and no imperial organ- 
 ization 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 over- 
 sea to appreciate the delicacies of the Euro- 
 pean 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 super- 
 structure. 
 
 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 
 
224 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 un- 
 defended 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 them- 
 selves 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 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 225 
 
 with Western morality and methods of war- 
 fare, will be always content to refrain from 
 turning against Europe the means of expan- 
 sion 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 
 p 
 
226 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 — 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 par- 
 liament has done to be unconstitutional. No 
 Act of Parliament can be illegal or unconstitu- 
 tional, 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 constitu- 
 tion by any Act, the Supreme Court may de- 
 clare 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 repre- 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 227 
 
 sented 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 estab' 
 lished 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, mis- 
 believers, and unbelievers of all sorts, were 
 admitted to the fullest rights of citizenship. 
 State and church ceased to correspond; one 
 
228 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 sover- 
 eignty 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 concep- 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 229 
 
 tion ; 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 Revolu- 
 tion 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, 
 
 1 
 
230 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 Conserva- 
 tives 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 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 231 
 
 of Commons infinitely more representative 
 than it had been before, and gave it its con- 
 clusive superiority over the House of Lords. 
 Not that the Peers represent no one but them- 
 selves ; had that been true, the House of Lords 
 would have disappeared long ago. In reality 
 it came to embody a fairly complete repre- 
 sentation of the Conservative party; and as 
 a party does not need two legislative organs, 
 the House of Lords retired whenever the Con- 
 servatives 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 bul- 
 wark; 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 exten- 
 sion of its activity, which would naturally have 
 followed upon the acquisition by the people 
 
232 THE HISTORY OP ENGLAND 
 
 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 ; con- 
 stitutional 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 graci- 
 ous 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 any- 
 thing 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 
 overmighty manufacturers and landlords in 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 233 
 
 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 evolu- 
 tion 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 
 
234 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 surround- 
 ings. In a better sense of the word, the evolu- 
 tion 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 land- 
 lords who had already obtained from parlia- 
 ment hundreds of Inclosure Acts, and to manu- 
 facturers 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 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 235 
 
 that they would be happy when they got it, as 
 it if 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 pro- 
 vided 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 
 
236 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 antithesis of Man versus the State has almost 
 been reduced to one of Woman versus the State. 
 But representative government, which prom- 
 ised 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 paralysing the food- 
 supply or other national necessities. This is ob- 
 viously 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; 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 237 
 
 otherwise its object is merely obstructive. 
 The third method is the supersession of parlia- 
 ment by the action of the executive. The 
 difficulties which Liberal measures have experi- 
 enced in the House of Lords, and the impossi- 
 bility 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 parlia- 
 ment as an unnecessary middleman, and to 
 advocate in its stead a sort of plebiscitary 
 bureaucracy, a constitution under which legis- 
 lation 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 Devo- 
 
 ^ 
 
238 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 lution, 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 colo- 
 nial 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 ad- 
 minister, within the limits imposed by Act of 
 Parliament; but their development, like the 
 multiplication of central administrative de- 
 partments, 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 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 239 
 
 such as the PubUc 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 Secre- 
 tary of State. It is probable, moreover, that 
 departments will multiply and subdivide at 
 an ever-increasing rate. 
 
 All this, however, is merely machinery pro- 
 vided 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 
 
240 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 or the customs ; but is reserved for the grosser 
 offences which no member of the congregation 
 is hkely 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 neigh- 
 bour when one's neighbour is not one indivi- 
 dual 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 econo- 
 mic laissez faire was made by Sadler, Shaftes- 
 bury, 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 fraudu- 
 lent deahngs 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 indivi- 
 dual. Now, it might have been possible, when 
 the expense of these new standards of public I 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 241 
 
 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 per- 
 haps 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 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 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 
 \hey themselves mean by the epithets they 
 employ. In the sense in which the individualist 
 uses the term socialist, there are hardly any 
 sociahsts, 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 individuahsm. The defect of so- 
 called economic individualism is that it re- 
 duces 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 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 243 
 
 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 commu- 
 nist has maintained that we are all communists 
 because we have developed a common army, a 
 common navy, and a common national govern- 
 ment, 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, high- 
 ways 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 
 ei dure, by which the obstinate individualist 
 
244 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 was, when accused, compelled to surrender 
 his ancient immunity and submit to the com- 
 mon 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 govern- 
 ment 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 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 245 
 
 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 re- 
 duced civil strife to political combats, restrained 
 national conflicts by treaties of arbitration, 
 and subdued private wars to judicial proceed- 
 ings ; 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 for- 
 goes 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 re- 
 spect remains at the moment a test of its self- 
 control and sense of collective responsibility. 
 
 Whether this growth of power in the indivi- 
 dual and in the state is a good or an evil 
 thing depends on the conscience of those who 
 wield it. The power of the overmighty sub- 
 ject 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 
 
246 THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND 
 
 hostile or unscrupulous hands. But the forces 
 of evil cannot be overcome by laissez jaire^ and 
 power is an indispensable weapon of progress. 
 A powerless state means a helpless com- 
 munity ; and anarchy is the worst of all forms 
 of tyranny, because it is irresponsible, incorrig- 
 ible, 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 
 
ENGLISH DEMOCRACY 247 
 
 acquired faith, not in miraculous interven- 
 tion, 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 civiliza- 
 tion ; 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 govern- 
 ment is not merely to embody the organized 
 might and the executive brain of England, 
 but also to enforce its collective and co- 
 ordinating conscience. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 B.C. 55. Julius Ceesar's first invasion of Britain. 
 
 A.D. 43-410. 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. 
 
 802-839. Ecgberht establishes West Saxon supremacy. 
 855. Danes first winter in England. 
 878. Peace of Wedmore between Alfred and the Danes. 
 900 (?). Death of Alfred. 
 
 900(?)-975. Edward the Elder, Athelstan, and Edgar. Ilecon- 
 
 quest of the Danelaw. 
 978-1013. Etheb-ed the Unready. Ketm?n of the Danes. 
 1016. Edmund Ironside. 
 1016-1035. Canute. 
 
 1042-1066. 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. IIexry 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 Bccket. 
 
 1189-1199. Richard I. Crusade and wars in France. 
 
 1199-1216. John's tyranny. Loss of Normandy (1204). 
 Quarrel with the church and baronage. Tries to retrieve 
 his position by spirited foreign policy. Defeated at 
 Bou vines (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 
 
 248 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 249 
 
 in tho 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, to^^ms, commerce. The Model Par- 
 liament (1275, 1295). Confirmation of the charters (1297). 
 National resistance to tho 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 hostiUty to the Papacy. Decay of manorial system : 
 emancipation of villeins : growth of industry and towns. 
 
 1377-1399. liiCHARD 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 overmighty 
 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 Vv^ars 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 overmighty 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 
 tho Clergy, Acts of Annates, Appeals (1532-1533) and 
 Supremacy (1534). 
 
 1536. Suppression of tho 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. 
 1568-1669. FUght of Mary Queen of Scots into England, and 
 
 rebellion of the northern oarla. 
 
 1570. Papal excommunication and deposition of Elizabeth. 
 
 1571. Ridolfi's plot. 
 
250 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 1572. Execution of Norfolk and extinction of English dukedoms. 
 Beginning of the Dutch Republic. Massacre of St. Bar- 
 tholomew. 
 
 1577-1580. Drake sails round the world. 
 
 1587. Execution of Mary Queen of Scots. 
 
 1588. Spanish Armada. 
 1539-1601. 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." 
 
 1638-9. 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. 
 
 1680. The Restoration. Charles II. 
 1662. The last Act of Uniformity. 
 
 1684. War with the Dutch : conquest of New Netherland. 
 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. Chai'les 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 Mediter- 
 ranean 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. 
 
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 251 
 
 1739. War with Spain. 
 
 1741-1748. War of the Austrian Succession. Clive in India. 
 1756-1763. Seven Years' War. 
 1757. Battle oi Plassey. 
 
 1759. Capture ol Quebec. 
 
 1760. Gkorge III. 
 
 1764-1779. Inventions by Arkwright, Harj?reaves, and Cromp- 
 
 ton. Beg-iniiing of the Industrial Revolution. 
 1765. Grenville's Stamp Act. 
 
 1770. Lord North Prime Mini ter. Captain Cook surveys 
 
 Australia and New Zealand. 
 1774. The Quebec Act. 
 
 1776. Declaration of American Independence. Adam Smith's 
 
 Wealth of Natdons. 
 1778-1779. France and Spain join the Americans. 
 
 1780. Tlie " Armed Neutrality." Warren Hastings saves 
 India. 
 
 1781. Fall of Yorktown. 
 
 1732. Volunteer movement in Ireland. Irish parliamentary 
 independence. 
 
 1783. American independence prranted. 
 
 1784. Pitt Prime Minister : his India Bill. 
 
 1788. Convict settlement in Australia. 
 
 1789. French devolution. 
 
 1791. The Canadian Constitutional Act. 
 17S4.. 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. Wellcsley in India. Capture of Seringapatam. Partition, 
 of Mysore and the Carna.tic. 
 
 1800. Union of Great Britain and Ireland. Seizure of Malta. 
 
 1801. Battle of Copeniiagen. 
 
 1802. Peax3e of Amiens. 
 
 1803. Battles of Assye and Argaum. Defeat of the Mahrattas^ 
 
 1805. Battle of Trafalgar. 
 
 1806. Second capture of tlie Cape. 
 1808-1 SI 4. Peninsular War. 
 1810. Capture of Mam-itius. 
 1812-1814. War with the United States. 
 
 1814. Corn Laws passed. 
 
 1815. Battle of Waterloo. 
 1820. Gkorqe IV. 
 
 1825. Huskisson's Tariff Reform. 
 
 1827. Battle of Navarino. 
 
 1828. Corn Laws revised. ^ ^, -r. 
 1828-1829. Repeal of Test Act. Roman Catholic Emanci- 
 pation. 
 
 1830. WIL1.IAM IV. W^higs return to power. 
 
 1832. First Reform Act. Representative Government estaD- 
 
 iished in Newtoundland. 
 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. 
 
252 CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 
 
 1846. Corn Laws repealed. 
 
 1848. Kesponsible self-government in Canada, New Brunawick, 
 and Nova Scotia. 
 
 1849. Repeal of the Navigation Acts. 
 
 1852. Responsible government developed in Australia and 
 New Zealand. 
 
 1853. Roprescntative 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. 
 
 1887. 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. Annexa- 
 tion 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. EstabUshment of district and parish councils. 
 
 1895. Jameson Raid. 
 
 1896-1898. Reconquest of the Sudan. 
 1899-1902. The Great Boer War. 
 
 1900. EstabUshment of the Australian Commonwealth. 
 
 1901. Edward VII. 
 
 1904. Russo-Japanese War. 
 
 1905. Anglo -Japanese alliance. 
 
 1908-1907. Responsible government granted to tlie Transvaal 
 and Orange River Colonies. 
 
 1909. The Union of South Africa. 
 
 1910. GEonaE V. 
 
 1911. Asquith*s Parliament Act. Capital of Tndia transferred 
 from Calcutta to Delhi. Beginnings of National Insurance. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 J. R. Greek'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 Englavdy 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 Lectif,res on Constitutional History (Cambridge 
 University Press), and for a compendium of facts may use 
 Medley's Constitutional History of England (Blackweil). 
 
 Periods can be studied in greater detail in — J. R. Green : 
 The Making of Engla'}id and Th-e Conquest of England (Mac- 
 millan). Freeman : Norman Conquest^ 6 vols. , and William 
 Bufus, 2 vols. (Oxford University Press). Norgate : England 
 under the Angevins, 2 vols., and John Laclcland (Macmillan). 
 Ramsay : Lancaster and Yorlc^ 2 vols. Froude : History of 
 England, 1529-1588, 12 vols. (Longmans). Gardiner: History 
 of EnglaM, 1603-1642, 10 vols. ; Civil War, 1642-1649, 
 4 vols. ; Commomvealth and Protectorate, 1649-1656, 4 vols. 
 (Longmans). Macaulay : History of England, 1685-1702 
 (Longmans). Lecky : History of England, 1714-1793, 7 vols.; 
 Irela^id, 1714-1800, 5 vols. (Longmans). Spencer Walpole : 
 History of Englaiid, 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 : Constitniional History, 1485-1760, 3 vols. (Murray). 
 Erskine May : Constitutional History, 1760-1860, 3 vols. 
 (Longmans). Anson : Law and Cicstom of the Constitution, 
 3 vols. (Oxford University Press). Dicey : Custom of the 
 Constitittion (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 
 hid.ustry and Commerce, 3 vols. ; Ashley's Economic History, 
 2 vols. (Macmillan), and Toyi^bile' s l7idustrial Revolution ; for 
 sketches of movements and biographies, see Macauiay's 
 Essays (Longmans), Stubbs's Lectures on Medioeval cmd Modern 
 History (Oxford Univei-sity Press), and Pollard's Factors in 
 Modern History (Constable). 
 
 253 
 
INDEX 
 
 AfricAj South, Union of, 220-1 
 Afeiiicourt, 84 
 Alfred the Great, 18, 27, 51 
 American Colonies, 1&2, 155, 160-3, 
 228 
 
 Anglo-Saxons, 9, 11-20, 30-1, 44, 
 
 50, 1V6 
 Anne, Queen, 140-1 
 Armada, Spanish, 113 
 Australia, 1G9, 207-17 
 
 Bacon, Roger, 88 
 
 Baronage, 35, 42, 46, 51-2, 58, 79- 
 
 81, 227 
 Biironets, 111 
 Battle, trial by, 47-8 
 Bede, 16, 88 
 Black Death, 78 
 Boers, 210, 220-1 
 Boroughs or burhs, 12 
 Bosworth, battle of, 118 
 Botany Bay, 109 
 Boyne, battle of the, 150 
 Bui-gh, Hubert de, 58 
 Burke, Edmund, 149 
 
 Cabal, 133-4 
 Cabinet, 142-3 
 Cabot, 108 
 Caedmon, 16 
 Calais, 73, 103 
 
 Canada, 155, 158-9, 1C8-9, 208-10, 
 
 215-19 
 Canute, 28 
 
 aape Colony, 171, 209, 213 
 Capitalism, 179, 198 
 Cecil, Sir William, 110, 111, 246 
 Chambers, Second, 215-17 
 Chai-les I, 123-30, 155, 188 
 
 II, 131-5, 153-4, 160 
 
 Chatham, Lord, 143 
 Chaucer, 77, 88 
 
 Church in England, 17, 19, 21, 26, 
 44-^, 66, 68-9, 76, 91-101, 115, 
 127, 132, 227, 239 
 
 Clarendon, Lord, 133-4 
 Clive, Lord, 159 
 Coke, Chief-justice, 53 
 Commerce, growth of, 106-8, 167, 
 
 177, 181, 183-5 
 Common law, 50 
 
 Commons, House of, 73-5, 79, 
 130-1, 139, 144, 146-9, 157, 231-2 
 Cook, Captain, 169 
 Corn-laws, 147, 192-4 
 Cre^y, battle of, 66, 73 
 Crimean War, 199, 202 
 Cromwell, Oliyer, 130 
 Curia Hegis, 48 
 
 Danby, 134 
 Danegeld, 28, 39 
 Danes, 17-30 
 
 Darwinism in politics, 233 
 Disraeli, 191, 201 
 Divine right of kings, 118-19 
 Domesday Book, 38 
 Drake, Sir Francis, 109, 113 
 Dukes, 79, 90, 110-11 
 Dupleix, 159 
 Durham, Lord, 209, 211 
 Dutch, 153-5, 163, 170, 209 
 
 Earls and earldoms, 41, 79 
 Ecgberht, 18, 29 
 Edgar, 19 
 
 Edmund Ironside, 28, 43 
 Edward the Elder, 19 
 
 Confessor, 29 
 
 I, 17, 32, 59, 62-71, 101 
 
 II, 71, 82 
 
 Ill, 71-83, 88, 108 
 
 IV, 87 
 
 VI, 101 
 
 Egypt, 170-1, 205-7 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen, 94, 104-16, 149 
 
 Ethelred the Unready, 27 
 
 Factories, 181-6, 197, 233 
 
INDEX 
 
 255 
 
 Federation, 219-23 
 i^^udalism, 23-7, 35-40, 60-1, 67-8, 
 105 
 
 France, 35, 71-2, 76, 80, 84, 91, 108, 
 112, 113, 126, 134, 153, 155-9, 163, 
 170-2, 202-4 
 
 Pi'ith-borhs, 24-5 
 
 George I, 141 
 II, 155 
 
 Ill, 143, 148-9, 163, 166, 228 
 
 Gibraltar, 157, 164 
 
 Gladstone, W. B., 192, 195, 201, 235 
 
 Godwine, 29 
 
 Grenville, George, 161 
 
 Guthrum, 18, 27 
 
 Habeas Coi-pus Act, 134 
 Harold, 29, 32 
 
 Hastings, battle of, 7, 30, 43 
 Hastings, Warren, 164 
 Henry I, 42-3, 49 
 
 II, 32, 45-52, 62, 67, 72, 101 
 
 Ill, 57-9 
 
 IV, 83-4 
 
 V, 84-5, 88-9, 108 
 
 VI, 84-5 
 
 VII, 87-90, 108 
 
 VIIJ, 90-101, 106, 109, 115, 117 
 
 Hereditary principle, 41, 47, 118 
 Hereward, 32 
 
 Hobbes, Thomas, 126, 228, 233 
 Hundreds, 23-4, 39, 40, 63 
 Hundred Years' War, 71-86 
 
 Image-worsliip, 98-100 
 Inclosure Acts, 102, 182-3, 187-8, 
 234 
 
 Independents, 129-31 
 
 India, 10, 33, 150, 154, 159, 167-172, 
 
 202-3, 205-6 
 Individualism, 241-3 
 Ireland, 113, 114, 130, 104-6, 193 
 Italy, 201, 203 
 
 James I, 115-23 
 
 II, 135-7, 156, 160 
 
 Jesuits, 111 
 
 John, King, 51-2, 56-8, 61 
 Jury, tiial by, 31, 47-8, 55 
 Jutes, 11, 13 
 
 Rett's rebellion, 102 
 Kruger, President, 214-15 
 
 Lai&sfz faire, 198, 229, 232 
 Lancaster, Thomas of, 82 
 
 Langland, 77 
 
 Liberty and liberties, 53-4, 125, 
 129, 137, 148, 229 
 
 LoUardy, 76-8, 97 
 
 London, 43, 107, 189 
 
 Lords, House of, 73, 79-81, 84, 107, 
 130-1, 139, 143, 145, 157, 166, 168, 
 191-2, 216-17, 231, 235, 243 
 
 Magna Carta, 51-6, 70 
 Malthus, 190 
 Manorial system, 39-40 
 Marquises, 79 
 
 Mary, Queen, 91, 101, 103, 108 
 
 Queen of Scots, 110, 113 
 
 Matilda, 44 
 Merchant guilds, 61 
 Minorca, 157 
 
 Montfort, Simon de, 59, 69 
 More, Sii* Thomas, 94 
 
 Natal, 210, 213 
 Nationalism, 67, 69, 75-6 
 Navigation Acts, 154, 157, 161, 196 
 Navy. 109-10 
 Netherlands, 112, 113, 201 
 Newfoundland, 108, 151, 212 
 New Monarchy, 83, 87, 89 
 New Zealand, 169, 209, 213, 217, 
 219 
 
 Normandy, loss of, 58 
 
 Normans, 31-44 
 
 Nova Scotia, 151, 158, 212 
 
 Orange River State, 210, 213-15 
 Ordeal, trial by, 47-8 
 
 Parliament, growth of, 51, 59, 60, 
 63-5, 73-5, 95, 101, 115, 117-49, 
 166, 190-2, 236-8 
 
 Peel, Sir Robert, 193, 195 
 
 Peers, 54, 79-83, 157, 166 
 
 Persia, 204 
 
 Philip 11, 103-4 
 
 Pilgrim Fathers, 151, 169 
 
 Pitt, William, 143, 149, 166, 168, 
 170, 194 
 
 Poitiers, battle of, 66, 73 
 
 Political parties, 127, 140-1 
 
 Poor laws, 178 
 
 Portugal, 112, 153, 201 
 
 Prcemunire, 76 
 
 Presbyterians, 124, 129 
 
 Primogeniture, 41 
 
 Protestantism, 91-101 
 
 ProvU&i s, 76 
 
25G 
 
 INDEX 
 
 Quakers, 227 
 Quebec, 159 
 Queensland, 209 
 
 Referendum, 23G-7 
 
 Reform Acts of 1832-1885, 191-S, 
 
 230-1, 235 
 Reformation, 91-101 
 Renaissance, 96 
 
 Representation, principles of, 55, 
 63-5 
 
 Representative government, 208- 
 10 
 
 Responsible government, 137, 203, 
 
 210-14 
 Restoration, 131 
 Revolution of 1G83, 136-9 
 
 , French, 149, 159, 229 
 
 , Indiistnal, 149, 173-199 
 
 Rhodes, Cecil, 214, 215 
 Richard I, 32, 52, 57, 61 
 
 II, 79-83 
 
 Ill, 87 
 
 Right, Petition of, 124 
 Rights, Bill of, 136, 100 
 Rights of Man, 228-9 
 Roman Law, 50 
 Romans in Britain, 9-11 
 Roses, Wars of the, 83-7, 90 
 Russia, 163, 201-4 
 
 Salisbury oath, the, 40 
 Scotland, 69, 151, 156-7 
 Scutage, 46, 128 
 Shakespeare, 114 
 Sheriffs, 86, 41-2, 46 
 Bhires, 36, 39-40, 63 
 Sluys, battle of, 73 
 Socage, 37 
 Socialism, 241-3 
 
 South Africa, 209-10, 213-15, 217, 
 
 220-2 
 
 Spain, 103, 109-11, 113, 153, 159, 
 
 163, 201 
 Spelman, Sir Henry, 85, 53 
 Stamp Act, 161 
 
 Star Chamber, 90, 132 
 Stephen, King, 44 
 Suez Canal, 202 
 
 Tallage, 55, 70, 75 
 
 Tariff Reform, 195 
 
 Taxation, 55, 62-8, 123, 138-9, 
 
 161-2 
 Thegns, 21 
 Tories, 134-5, 140-3 
 Towns, growth of, 60-1, 177-8 
 Trafalgar, battle of, 170 
 Transubstantiation, 78, 99 
 Transvaal, 210, 213-15 
 Turkey, 200, 202 
 
 Ulster, 151, 165 
 
 United States, 155, 163-5, 210, 219, 
 
 220-1, 226 
 Utrecht, Peace of, 145, 158 
 
 Victoria, 209 
 
 Villeins, 38, 55, 65, 78-9, 178 
 Virginia, 151-2 
 Viscounts, 41-2, 79 
 
 Wales 16 69 
 
 Walpole, Sir Robert, 142, 158, 159, 
 
 161, 185 
 Walsingham, Sir F., 106, 111 
 Waltheof, 32 
 
 V»^arwick the King-maker, 87 
 Waterloo, battle of, ITiJ, 199 
 Wellesley, Marquess, 171 
 Wellington, Duke of, 171 
 West Indies, 152, 173 
 Whigs, 134-5, 140-3, 164 
 William I, 29-31 
 
 II, 42 
 
 Ill, 136-40 
 
 Witan, the, 21 
 Wolfe, General, 159 
 Wolsey, Cardinal, 90, 123 
 Women's Suffrage, 217 
 Wycliffe, 76, 88 
 
 Richard Clay <{: Soyis, Ltd., London and JSun(/atf» 
 
Home University 
 
 T ;UrQirT7 °f Modern 
 
 LilDiary Knowledge 
 
 Cloth 
 
 1/- 
 
 net 
 
 Jl Comprehensive Series of New 
 and Specially Written ^B^oks 
 
 Leather 
 
 2/6 
 
 net 
 
 EDITORS : 
 
 Prof. GILBERT MURRAY, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A. 
 Mr HERBERT FISHER, M.A., F.B.A. 
 Prof. J. ARTHUR THOMSON, M.A. 
 Prof. WM. T. BREWSTER, M.A. 
 
 "The highly ingenious, attractive, and suggestive series of 
 shilling books which now makes its bow to the public under the 
 Home University Library's ensign is the symbol, in somerespects 
 of a revival, in others of a new era, in bibliology. In either case 
 it is a symptom both of health and of hope in the future. . . • 
 Each volume represents a three-hours' traffic with the talking- 
 power of a good brain, operating with the ease and interesting 
 freedom of a specialist dealing with his own subject ... A series 
 which promises to perform a real social service." — TJie Times. 
 
 "With the growth of popular education of all grades, it was 
 natural to believe that there are a very large number of men and 
 women of all ages to whom such a series as this would be a price- 
 less boon and comfort. . . . The immediate discovery of a large, 
 highly intelligent public, with ideas and criticisms of its own, is an 
 invaluable reward to the public spirit that has inspired this under- 
 taking, and a sign of great encouragement to all who are in- 
 terested in the liberal education of the State."- The Nation. 
 
 " We can think of no series now being issued which better 
 deserves support." — The Observe^'. 
 
 "Certainly no publishing enterprise of our time is more 
 remarkable or better deserving of success." — Manchester 
 Guardian. 
 
 "These dainty, vivid little books lend a new attraction to 
 the acquisition of useful knowledge. Bright, spirited, and 
 infallibly direct in their appeal, they should prove a treasure- 
 house of inexhaustible value to those who are unable to afford 
 expensive encyclopaedias and weighty scientific treatises. For 
 here is the world's learning in little, and none too poor to give 
 it house-room ! " — Daily Telegraph. 
 
 1 
 
History and Geography 
 
 3. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION 
 
 By HiLAiRE Belloc, M.A. (With Maps.) "It is coloured with 
 all the militancy of the author's temperament." — Daily News. 
 
 4. HISTORY OF WAR AND PEACE 
 
 By G. H. Perris. The Rt. Hon. James Bryce writes: "I have 
 read it with much interest and pleasure, admiring the skill with 
 which you have managed to compress so many facts and views into 
 so small a volume." 
 
 8. POLAR EXPLORATION 
 
 By Dr W. S. Bruce, F.R.S.E., Leader of the "Scotia" Expedition. 
 (With Maps.) " A very freshly written and interesting narrative." — 
 The Times. "A fascinating book." — Portsmouth Times. 
 
 12. THE OPENING-UP OF AFRICA 
 
 By Sir H. H. Johnston, G.C.M.G., K.C.B., D.Sc, F.Z.S. 
 (With Maps.) "The Home University Library is much enriched 
 by this excellent] work." — Daily Mail. 
 
 13. MEDIMVAL EUROPE 
 
 By H. W. C. Davis, M.A. (With Maps.) " A good specimen of 
 the work of the modern historian." — Christian World. "One 
 more illustration of the fact that it takes a complete master of the 
 subject to write briefly upon it." — Manchester Guardian. 
 
 14. THE PAPACY & MODERN TIMES 
 
 ( 1303-1870) 
 
 By the Rev. Wm. Barry, d.D. "The Papacy," says the author 
 m his preface, "was for hundreds of years suzerain over kings, and 
 the Holy Roman Empire was its armed defender. It is now the 
 head of a world-wide voluntary association which wields no sword 
 but its faith. How so remarkable a transformation came to pass and 
 what it means politically is my subject.*' 
 
 23. HISTORY OF OUR TIME, 1885-1911 
 
 By G. P. GoocH, M.A. " Mr Gooch contrives to breathe vitality 
 into his story, and to give us the flesh as well as the bones of recent 
 happenings, "—^^(^^^^^^(jr. 
 
 2 
 
25. THE CIVILISATION OF CHIN J 
 
 By H. A. Giles, LL.D., Professor of Chinese in the University of 
 Cambridge. "In all the mass of facts, Professor Giles never 
 becomes dull. He is always ready with a ghost story or a street 
 adventure for the reader's recreation." — Spectator, 
 
 29. THE DAWN OF HISTORY 
 
 By J. L. Myres, M.A., F.S.A., Wykeham Professor of Ancient 
 History, Oxford. *' There is not a page in it that is not suggestive." 
 — Manchester Guardian, 
 
 33. THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND : 
 
 A Study in Political Evolution. 
 
 By A. F. Pollard, M.A., Professor of English History in London 
 University. With a Chronological Table. 
 
 34. CANADA 
 
 By A. G. Bradley, Author of "The Making of Canada," etc. 
 The story of the Dominion brought down to the morrow of the 
 elections of 191 1. 
 
 37. PEOPLES & PROBLEMS OF INDIA 
 
 By Sir T. W. Holderness, K.C.S.I., Secretary of the Revenue, 
 Statistics, and Commerce Department of the India Office. 
 
 42. ROME 
 
 By W. Warde Fowler, M.A., Author of "Social Life at Rome 
 in the Age of Cicero," " Life of Julius Csesar," etc. 
 
 In Preparation 
 
 ANCIENT GREECE, By Prof. Gilbert Murray, D.Litt. 
 LL.D., F.B.A. 
 
 ANCIENT EGYPT. By Dr F. L. Griffith, M.A., F.R.S. 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF EUROPE. By Herbert Fisher, 
 M.A., F.B.A. 
 
 THE REFORM A TION. By Principal Lindsay, LL.D. 
 A SHORT HISTORY OF RUSSIA. By Prof. Milyoukov. 
 MODERN TURKEY. By D. G. Hogarth, M.A. 
 THE EVOL UTION OF CITIES. By Prof. Patrick Geddes, 
 M.A. 
 
Literature and <tArt 
 
 2. SHAKESPEARE 
 
 By John Masefield. ''The book is a joy. We have had half-a- 
 dozen more learned books on Shakespeare in the last few years, but 
 not one so wise." — Manchester Guardian. 
 
 27. ENGLISH LITERATURE: MODERN 
 
 By G. H. Mair, M.A. *' Altogether a fresh and individual book." 
 — Observer. 
 
 35. LANDMARKS IN FRENCH 
 LITERATURE 
 
 By G. L. Strachev. 
 
 39. ARCHITECTURE 
 
 By Prof. W. R. Lethabv. With over forty Illustrations. 
 
 In Preparation 
 
 ENGLISH LITER A TURE: MEDIEVAL. By Prof. W. P. 
 Ker, M.A. 
 
 ANCIENT ART AND RITUAL. By Miss Jane Harrison, 
 LL.D., D.Litt. 
 
 THE RENAISSANCE. By Mrs R. A. Taylor. 
 ITALIAN ART OF THE RENAISSANCE. By Roger E. 
 Fry, M.A. 
 
 THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. By L. Pearsall Smith, M.A. 
 ENGLISH COMPOSITION. By Prof. Wm. T. Brewster. 
 ORE A T WRITERS OF AMERICA. By Prof. W. P. Trent 
 and Prof. J. Erskine. 
 
 GREAT WRITERS OF RUSSIA. By C. T. Hagberg 
 Wright, LL.D. 
 
 THE LITERATURE OF GERMANY. By Prof. J. G. 
 Robertson, M.A., Ph.D. 
 
 Philosophy and ^ligion 
 
 15. MOHAMMEDANISM 
 
 By Prof. D. S. Margoliouth, M.A,, D.Litt. "This generous 
 shilling's worth of wisdom. ... A delicate, humorous, and most 
 responsible tractate by an illuminative professor." — Daily Mail, 
 
40. THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHT 
 
 By the Hon. Bertrand Russell, F.R.S. 
 
 In Preparation 
 
 THE OLD TESTAMENT. By Prof. George Moore, D.D., 
 LL.D. 
 
 BETWEEN THE OLD AND NEW TESTAMENTS. By 
 R. H. Charles, D.D. 
 
 THE MAKING OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. By Prof. 
 B. W. Bacon, Litt.D., D.D. 
 
 COM PAR A TIVE RELIGION. By Prof. J. Estlin Carpenter, 
 D.Litt. 
 
 A HISTORY OF FREEDOM OF THOUGHT. By Prof. 
 J. B. Bury, LL.D. 
 
 ETHICS. By G. E. Moore. 
 BUDDHISM. By Mrs Rhys Davids, M.A. 
 NONCONFORMITY AND THE FREE CHURCHES. By 
 Principal Selbie, M.A. 
 
 Science 
 
 7. MODERN GEOGRAPHT 
 
 By Dr Marion Newbigin. (Illustrated.) "Geography, again: 
 what a dull, tedious study that was wont to be ! . . . But Miss 
 Marion Newbigin invests its dry bones with the flesh and blood 
 of romantic interest, taking stock of geology as a fairy-book of 
 science." — Daily Telegraph. 
 
 (). THE EVOLUTION OF PL J NTS 
 
 By Dr D. H. Scott, M.A., F.R.S., late Hon. Keeper of the 
 Jodrell Laboratory, Kew. (Fully illustrated.) "The informa- 
 tion which the book provides is as trustworthy a first-hand know- 
 ledge can make it. . . . Dr Scott's candid and familiar style makes 
 the difficult subject both fascinating and easy." — Gardeners' 
 Chronicle. 
 
 17. HEALTH AND DISEASE 
 
 By W. Leslie Mackenzie, M.D., Local Government Board, 
 Edinburgh. "The science of public health administration has 
 had no abler or more attractive exponent than Dr Mackenzie. 
 He adds to a thorough grasp of the problems an illuminating 
 style, and an arresting manner of treating a subject often dull 
 and sometimes unsavoury." — Economist. 
 
1 8. INTRODUCTION to MATHEMATICS 
 
 By A. N. Whitehead, Sc.D., F.R.S. (With Diagrams.) *'Mr 
 Whitehead has discharged with conspicuous success the task he 
 is so exceptionally qualified to undertake. For he is one of our 
 great authorities upon the foundations of the science, and has 
 the breadth of view which is so requisite in presenting to the 
 reader its aims. His exposition is clear and striking." — West' 
 minster Gazette, 
 
 19, THE ANIMAL WORLD 
 
 By Professor F. W. Gamble, D. Sc., F.R.S. (Maiiy ITlustrations.) 
 " For the thoughtful and philosophically minded student at the 
 present day," says Sir Oliver Lodge, in his Introduction to this 
 volume, "such a book is most timely and helpful. ... I am glad 
 to have the opportunity of commending the series to that increasing 
 number of readers who are hungry for trustworthy and assimilable 
 information." 
 
 20. EFOLUTION 
 
 By Professor J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., and Professor Patrick 
 Geddes. This volume, which, as the Manchester Guardian 
 says, " is in its survey the most comprehensive of those devoted 
 to Science, and is in a sense the key to them all," summarises the 
 facts of Variation and Heredity, Selection, Function, and Environ- 
 ment, and the chief Evolution theories, and concludes with an 
 important "re-interpretation" of the development process. 
 
 22. CRIME AND INSANITY 
 
 By Dr C. A. Mercier, F.R.C.P., F.R.C.S., Author of "Text- 
 Book of Insanity," etc. " Furnishes much valuable information 
 from one occupying the highest position among medico-legal 
 psychologists." — Asylwn News. 
 
 28. PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 
 
 By W. F. Barrett, F.R.S., Professor of Physics, Royal College 
 of Science, Dublin, 1873-1910. "As a former President of the 
 Psychical Research Society, he is familiar with all the developments 
 of this most fascinating branch of science, and thus what he has to 
 say on thought-reading, hypnotism, telepathy, crystal-vision, spirit- 
 ualism, divinings, and so on, will be read with avidity." — Dundee 
 Courier. 
 
 31. ASTRONOMY 
 
 By A. R. HiNKS, M.A., Chief Assistant, Cambridge Observatory. 
 " Original in thought, eclectic in substance, and critical in treat- 
 ment. . . . No better little book is available." — School World* 
 
32. INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE 
 
 By J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., Regius Professor of Natural 
 History, Aberdeen University. " For those who have not yet 
 become possessed of the Library, this would form an appropriate 
 introduction. Professor Thorns Dn's delightful literary style is well 
 known ; and here he discourses freshly and easily on the methods of 
 science and its relations with philosophy, art, religion, and practical 
 life." — Aberdeen Journal. 
 
 36, CLIMATE AND WEATHER 
 
 By H. N. Dickson, D.Sc.Oxon., M.A., F.R.S.E., President of 
 the Royal Meteorological Society ; Professor of Geography in 
 University College, Reading. (With Diagrams.) 
 
 41. ANTHROPOLOGY 
 
 By R. R. Marett, M.A., Reader in Social Anthropology in Oxford 
 University. 
 
 In Preparation 
 
 ELECTRICITY, By Dr Gisbert Kapp. 
 MA TTER AND ENERGY. By F. Soddy, M.A., F.R.S. 
 CHEMISTRY. Py Prof. R. Meldola, F.R.S. 
 THE MAKING OF THE EARTH, By Prof. J. W. Gregory, 
 F R S. 3 J > 
 
 THE MINERAL WORLD. By Sir T. H. Holland, K.C.I.E., 
 D.Sc. 
 
 PRINCIPLES OF PHYSIOLOGY. By Prof. J. G. 
 
 McKendrick. 
 
 THE HUMAN BODY. By Dr A. Keith, M.D., F.R.C.S. 
 PSYCHOLOGY. By Prof. Wm. McDougall, M.A. 
 PLANT LIFE. By Prof. J. B. Farmer, F.R.S. 
 
 Social Science 
 
 I. PARLIAMENT 
 
 Its History, Constitution, and Practice. By Sir Courtenay P. 
 Ilbert, K.C.B.,K.C.S.L, Clerk of the House of Commons. "The 
 best book on the history and practice of the House of Commons 
 since Bagehot's 'Constitution.'" — Yorkshire Post. 
 
 5. THE STOCK EXCHANGE 
 
 ByF. W. Hirst, Editor of "The Economist." "A little treatise 
 which to an unfinancial mind must be a revelation. . . . The book 
 is as clear, vigorous, and sane as Bagehot's ' Lombard Street,' than 
 which there is no higher compliment." — Morning Leader. 
 
 6. IRISH NATIONALITY 
 
 By Mrs J. R. Green. "As glowing as it is learned. No book 
 could be more timely." — Daily News. " A powerful study. ... A 
 magnificent demonstration of the deserved vitality of the Gaelic 
 spirit." — Freeman's Journal. 
 
10. THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT 
 
 By J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P. "Admirably adapted for the 
 purpose of exposition." — The Times. " Mr MacDonald is a very 
 lucid exponent. . . . The volume will be of great use in dispelling 
 illusions about the tendencies of Socialism in this country." — The 
 Nation. 
 
 1 6. THE SCIENCE OF WEALTH 
 
 By J. A. HoBSON, M.A. "Mr J. A. Hobson holds an unique 
 position among living economists. . . . The text-book produced is 
 altogether admirable. Original, reasonable, and illuminating. 
 Nation. 
 
 21. LIBERALISM 
 
 By L. T. HoBHOusE, M.A., Professor of Sociology in the University 
 of London. "A book of rare quality. . . . We have nothing but 
 praise for the rapid and masterly summaries of the arguments from 
 first principles which form a large part of this book." — Westminster 
 Gazette. 
 
 24.. THE EVOLUTION OF INDUSTRY 
 
 By D. H. Macgregor, M.A., Professor of Political Economy in 
 the University of Leeds. *' A volume so dispassionate in terms may 
 be read with profit by all interested in the present state of unrest." — 
 Aberdeen Journal. 
 
 30. ELEMENTS OF ENGLISH LAW 
 
 By W. M. Geldart, M.A., B.C.L., Vinerian Professor of English 
 Law at Oxford. " Contains a very clear account of the elementary 
 principles underlying the rules of English law, and we can recom- 
 mend it to all who wish to become acquainted with these elementary 
 principles with a minimum of trouble." — Scots Law Times. 
 
 38. THE SCHOOL 
 
 An Introduction to The Study of Education, 
 
 By J. J. FiNDLAY, M.A., Ph.D., Professor of Education in 
 Manchester University. 
 
 In Preparation 
 
 CONSERVATISM. By Lord Hugh Cecil, M. A., M.P. (Vol.11.) 
 AGRICULTURE. By Professor W. Somerville. (Vol. 26.) 
 PRACTICAL IDEALISM. By Maurice Hewlett. 
 ELEMENTS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY. By Prof. S. J. 
 Chapman. 
 
 COMMONSENSE IN LA IV. By Prof. P. Vinogradoff, D.C.L. 
 
 THE CIVIL SERVICE. By Graham Wallas, M.A. 
 
 MISSIONS. By Mrs Cretgkton. 
 
 NEWSPAPERS. By G. B. Dibblee. 
 
 ENGLISH VILLAGE LIFE. By E. N. Bennett, M.A. 
 
 London: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE 
 
 And of all Bookshops and Bookstalls, 
 
 8 
 
J 
 
i 
 
GETTY RESEARCH INSTITUTE 
 
 3 3125 01421 3462