selves with their own excessive power." He spoke disdainfully of the notion that the real interests of the people will be secured by making provision "now and then to hold up a forest of fingers, or to convey each his bean or ballot into the box." The practical ends of good government would be best secured by a grand council

firmly constituted to perpetuity," and he held that under such a rule " we shall live the clearest and absolutest free nation in the world."

The downfall of the Commonwealth so intensified Milton's aversion to popular rule that it produced what is one of the most curious passages in all literature. In Paradise Regained, where the temptation in the wilderness is described, Satan's offer of the glory of this world is made the occasion of this tirade against democracy:

"To whom our Saviour calmly thus replied:
Thou neither dost persuade me to seek wealth
For empire's sake, nor empire to affect
For glory's sake, by all thy argument.

For what is glory but a blaze of fame,

The people's praise, if always praise unmixed?
And what the people but a herd confused,
A miscellaneous rabble, who extol

Things vulgar, and, well weighed, scarce worth
the praise?

They praise, and they admire, they know not what,

And know not whom, but as one leads the other ...

The intelligent among them and the wise

Are few, and glory scarce of few is raised."

Freedom and liberty are such variable terms that they have no definite content of meaning until one is informed, freedom from what? liberty to do what? When such details are obtained it appears that the leaders of thought and action in the Commonwealth period construed freedom as meaning relief from traditional authority that had become obnoxious; and they construed liberty as meaning the exercise of authority in accord with their own views. The actual control shifted from the Presbyterians to the Independents, from parliament to a narrow oligarchy, and thence to a military dictatorship, whose maintainers were well aware that the majority of the people were against them, but found in that fact only an incentive to greater zeal. Agents of the government were instructed to keep a watchful eye on the confluence of the people on any pretence." Orders were issued to seize all the private presses in the counties and to arrest the hawkers of books. The most frequent entry upon the records of this period is notice of a warrant against the circulation of books and newspapers. As a pamphlet of the times put the case, "the people were ruled before

by king, lords and commons; now by a general, court martial and commons." The change was so little to the liking of the people that royalty was restored without conditions at the first opportunity.

Two great philosophers of the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, wrote upon politics, but neither Hobbes' Leviathan (1651), nor Locke's Two Treatises on Government (1689), show any knowledge of a Teutonic or an Anglo-Saxon origin of political rights. Hobbes argued in behalf of unlimited power for princes, as the essential principle of order in the body-politic, although with an eye to contemporary English politics-he admitted the right of a subject to change his allegiance when a former sovereign's power to rule had irrevocably gone. Locke has been claimed as a champion of parliamentary authority, because he wrote in defense of the ultimate sovereignty of the people, but this was a corollary of his opinion that government must have originated in contract between men when living in a state of nature. This theory of the original contract, as manipulated by Rousseau seventy years later, became a violent corrosive, but Locke's own use of it was quite innocuous. Although he condemned absolute monarchy as "inconsistent with civil society," he showed de

cided favor to the exercise of autocratic authority on proper occasion. He remarked:

Salus populi suprema lex is certainly so just and fundamental a rule, that he who sincerely follows it can not dangerously err . . . prerogative being nothing but a power in the hands of the prince to provide for the public good in such cases which depending upon unforeseen and uncertain occurrences, certain and unalterable laws could not safely direct. Whatsoever shall be done manifestly for the good of the people, and the establishing of the government upon its true foundations, is, and always will be, just prerogative. . . . This power to act according to discretion, for the public good without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it, is that which is called prerogative.1

In general, it is to be observed that the struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, although they turned upon issues that caused political authority to be explored to its foundations, did not discover any tradition of popular liberty derived from Teutonic sources. The contending parties were animated by mutual intolerance, and each sought authority over the people with claims of divine right. Magisterial control over the behavior of the people was the common ideal of the Protestant reformers, but their attitude to existing institutions varied ac

1 Two Treatises on Government, Book II., chap. 13, sections 158, 160, 167.

cording to circumstances. In Germany, where Luther invoked the power of "the godly prince in opposition to papal authority, the Reformation tended powerfully to promote absolutism in politics. Where royal or princely authority was on the side of Catholicism, appeal was made to the people, not for the purpose of setting up popular rule but to establish a clerical rule, of a singularly oppressive character.1

From the writings of Catholic theologians, both before and during the Reformation period, many assertions of popular right might be collected, but for the present purpose it is not necessary to consider them, as no such theory has ever been advanced as that the democratic spirit of Catholicism owes anything to the usages of Teutonic heathen tribes.

1 Within a period of three years at Geneva under Calvin's rule" there were passed fifty-eight sentences of death, seventysix of banishment and eight to nine thousand of imprisonment on those whose crime was infringement of the church statutes. Hug and Stead, Switzerland, pp. 263, 267, 283, 285. Under Puritan rule in Massachusetts, branding, whipping, mutilation, banishment and hanging were among the penalties inflicted for offenses against ecclesiastical regulations. Cf. Brooks Adams, The Emancipation of Massachusetts, p. 39.