where a foolish woman and a crafty priest had enough to do in making head against the French nobles; and Sweden was in the hands of the degenerate daughter of Gustavus; and the democracy of Holland was infatuated in favor of the cold-blooded and selfish house of Orange.

The Restoration was the opportunity for the English Lords. They sprang at once into an active House of Parliament, with many new privileges, which they called old, and many ancient claims, which they passed to the uttermost. They were completely independent of the sovereign, for Charles knew that it would be wise to temporize with Parliament, and he quite understood how much he owed to the Lords. He never thwarted them but once, and on that occasion they strove, in the interest of one of their order, to annul a conveyance by act of Parliament-the conveyance, namely, made by the then Earl of Derby to Sergeant Glynne of the estate which, after long having been in possession of that lawyer's male descendants, is now occupied by Mr. Gladstone. The Restoration is the beginning of the modern House of Lords, just as it is the commencement of a twin institution, the modern English Church. Both these political instruments were so entirely changed at this epoch that their previous character has hardly any association with their later development has little more than an antiquarian interest. The Anglican Church, from the accession of Elizabeth to the Act of Uniformity, a period of about a century, was a national Church, rejected by only a few sectaries. Since the Act of Uniformity it has been mainly a political institution, weak in the large towns, and powerful chiefly by its association with the landed interest. The House of Lords up to the same period was feeble, servile, and wholly unimportant as a political institution. But, immediately on the Restoration, it became as vigorous as the House of Commons, and in a generation it overshadowed and controlled that House. During the reign of Charles II, almost every statesman who took a prominent position in public affairs was a peer. It was in the House of Lords that the opposition to Charles II's government was organized and matured. It was the House of Lords which expelled the Stuarts, and bestowed the crown on the remotest and, politically speaking, the most unimportant descendant of James I. The English royal family was placed on the throne, not only by an act of Parliament, which does not differ from any other act of Parliament, but was maintained on the throne by the Lords, for it was in this Chamber that the principles of the Revolution were dominant, and

it was this Chamber which thwarted the intrigues of Bolingbroke and Atterbury for the restoration of the Stuarts.

Several circumstances materially assisted the assertions of the Lords. They had been faithful to monarchical institutions, and yet had in the main secured their wealth, while they underwent an easy ostracism, which adhesion to the Protectorate would have instantly removed. On the other hand, the country gentlemen were more zealous for the exiled Stuarts, and were more seriously injured. The impoverished Cavaliers were all from the untitled gentry, for it would be difficult to find a single nobleman who lost his estate on account of either Charles. Again, many of those who had sided with the Revolution of Cromwell were ennobled for their adhesion to the Restoration of Charles. Some, like Ashley, afterward Lord Shaftesbury, had the baseness to sit in judgment on the men with whom they had acted, and to assist in the pitiful revenge which the restored King took on his enemies. Again, the last fifty years of the seventeenth century was a period in which wealth was accumulated in England with great rapidity, especially by companies trading on a common and chartered stock. Great improvements were also made during the same time in the art of agriculture, and rents rose with unexampled speed. The incomes of public officials had been small in the first half of the seventeenth century; they became enormous in the second half, for Charles introduced into England the French system, by which fees of office were multiplied. The policy of the Tudor kings had broken down entails, and the lawyers of the Restoration devised a new conveyance, under which an infinitely stricter entail was smuggled into English law. Hence, as an aristocracy is the inevitable government of any country, the law of which assists the aggregation of real estate in few hands, the English nobility had everything to favor them. Besides, it is impossible to adjust the balance of political power between two Chambers. One must needs serve the other, and Jacob will supplant Esau, or Esau vex Jacob. At this epoch the character of the House of Commons assisted the political superiority of the Lords. Gathered, in a fit of unreasoning passion and even more irrational loyalty, from the dregs of the Cavalier party, it sacrificed almost everything for which its predecessors had contended. It relinquished its control over the public purse, for it gave Charles a large hereditary revenue. It relinquished its control over the clergy, for it suffered Convocation to recast the Liturgy of the Church, contenting itself with the barren protest that it could have introduced changes, had it chosen, in the forms of pub

lic worship. It relinquished its hold on the nation by consenting to repeal the triennial act. It was poor, and was systematically bribed by the King. It was ignorant as well as venal, and was easily manipulated by the unprincipled adventurers who undertook business on Charles's account. In self-defense, because here there was a common interest, the Lords allowed it to assert Parliamentary privilege, and even made use of it, in order to indirectly strengthen the dominant order, while it quarreled with it over details. But, most of all, the decayed boroughs were largely bought by the nobles, and the representatives of these wretched villages became the obedient nominees of aristocratic proprietors. It was not wonderful, after the experience of power and wealth which came to the nobles through the Parliamentary system of the Restoration, that, when the Stuarts betook themselves to their old madness of suspending Parliamentary institutions, the Lords conspired against them and expelled them. If Charles had lived ten years longer, and had continued during those ten years, as he did during the last four of his reign, to dispense with Parliaments, he would have been as infallibly driven from his kingdom as his brother was.

It was during the reign of Charles II that the Lords arrogated or extended many of their privileges, as well as appropriated the substance of political power. They revived their claim to sit as a court of justice, and even on certain memorable occasions asserted that they had an original jurisdiction. Ultimately the Commons conceded that they had a right to hear appeals. Such a travesty of justice was never imagined, and the wonder is that it was tolerated. That a number of men, amounting sometimes to nearly two hundred, who were rarely possessed of any legal education, should presume to review the decisions of the courts, and decide questions of law by majorities, was as absurd as it was audacious. The lawyers showed their opinion of the matter by neglecting to report the Lords', decisions. But the right continued till, a serious scandal having been nearly perpetrated in 1769, in the Douglas peerage case, the lay Lords tacitly abandoned the practice of voting on appeals, and left this jurisdiction to such law Lords as might happen to belong to their House, and might have the leisure or inclination to attend to the pleadings. The Lords, during the same period, affirmed in the Purbeck case that a peer could not by any voluntary act of his own relinquish his peerage, and strove to restrain all criticism on their doings by the privilege of punishing what was called scandalum magnatum, inflicting penalties by their own act on those

who offended their order, as they did in the case of James, Percy, or refusing to administer justice, as they did in the case of Oates. It is possible, as Macaulay has urged, though the protests do not bear out his interpretation of the facts, that the Lords were angry at having been made the dupe of this infamous man ten or a dozen years before he came before them for redress, but there was no excuse for the attitude which they assumed toward their petitioner, and it is certain that long after the Revolution a very considerable section of the Lords believed in the reality of that conspiracy on which Oates gave evidence. The reversal of Stafford's attainder did not take place till 1824, one hundred and forty-four years after his conviction, and this reversal was even then strongly protested against by one of the most respectable peers.

The political power of the House of Lords, dominant since the Restoration, was made absolute at the Revolution. The peers expelled the male Stuarts, and became the heirs of their prerogative. That they succeeded to the functions of monarchy, and distributed them among the leading families of the Revolution, is curiously illustrated by their temporary patronage of letters. In every civilized community, except England, literary eminence is the readiest road to the highest administrative functions. In the United States, in France, and to some extent in Germany, conspicuous capacity in the noblest branch of human learning, history, is the passport to distinction, and, if the possessor of such learning cares for it, to the public service. In England it is a disadvantage, and, as a consequence, no public men are so ignorant of history as English politicians are, and no historians are such mere annalists and mere antiquaries as English men of letters. The philosophy of history, notwithstanding the abundant materials for it, is at the lowest ebb in England, which does not even possess a respectable summary of its own political

career.

For a time, however, the Lords found it to be expedient (and felt it to be expedient, till they discovered the easier art of corruption) to use the services of men of letters in support of the new model. Thanks to Cromwell's failure as a politician, the English people hated an army, and determined, thanks to the more conspicuous failure of the army which James gathered at Hounslow, to have done with armies in England, which, as the militia bill of the Long Parliament taught them, must be in the name of the Crown, but might be in the hands of a docile and well-regulated House of Commons. But it was necessary to conciliate, for a time at least, the

smothered republicanism of the towns, and to ridicule the dangerous but irrepressible stupidity of the country clergy and the country squires. At the Revolution, there was no peer of Parliament who could have produced the effect which Shaftesbury achieved, by his letter "of a person of quality to a friend in the country," and the Lords had to betake themselves to the services of men of letters. Such a man was sometimes a venal hack, as Defoe was in 1688-1720, and many leader-writers in London dailies are now. But he occasionally was a man of spirit as well as of ability. The Whigs of the Revolution never made a greater blunder than when they discarded and offended Swift. There is, I believe, no English political pamphlet which for vigor equals this writer's essay on the conduct of the allies, none in which there is more art, and, one must add, more sophistry. It was written when Swift had passed over to the Tories, when, after dancing attendance on Harley, and doing porter's work for his employers, he was finding at last that he had to elect between a precarious literary calling and banishment to an Irish deanery. To understand the conclusion of Swift's career in a modern parallel, we must imagine a leading English man of letters, who has gained a splendid but precarious reputation by the advocacy of a great and expectant party, offered, as the reward of his services, the bishopric of Toronto or of Cape Town!

The illegitimate children of Charles II had been raised to the highest rank in the peerage, but had joined the party of the nobles at the Revolution. Charles had done by his children what Louis XIV did by his. Before this time the title of duke had rarely been conferred on any but legitimate members of the royal family. After the Revolution it was very generally bestowed; for the heads of the English aristocracy had no mind to occupy an inferior rank to the offspring of those courtesans, especially as they were superior to them in wealth and influence. But it can not be doubted that the extensive grant of this title added to the political strength of the Lords, who were at the zenith of their power as a body in the reign of Anne, and were generally, indeed inevitably, Whig in their political tendencies. They were weakened, however, by the addition of the Scottish contingent in 1707, and by the simultaneous creation of twelve Tory peers on December 31, 1711. Nothing but the pressure of the strongest political necessity induced the English Lords to acquiesce in the introduction of the Scotch nobles to their Chamber. The Scotch peers were nearly as numerous as the English, though the population of the northern part of the island was probably not