contested claims, either in the position and determination of ancient usage, or in the constructive view of its analogies. Whereas, here the very question was concerning a body of usage and precedent, not denied in many cases as facts, whether that condition of policy, not unreasonable as adapted to a community, having but two dominant interests, were any longer safely tenable under the rise and expansion of a third. For instance, the whole management of our foreign policy had always been reserved to the crown, as one of its most sacred mysteries, or aлonta; yet, if the people could obtain no indirect control of this policy, through the amplest control of the public purse, even their domestic rights might easily be made nugatory. Again, it was indispensable that the crown purse, free from all direct responsibility, should be checked by some responsibility, operating in a way to preserve the sovereign in his constitutional sanctity. This was finally effected by the admirable compromise of lodging the responsibility in the persons of all servants by or through whom the sovereign could act. But this was so little understood by Charles I. as any constitutional privilege of the people, that he resented the proposal as much more insulting to himself than that of fixing the responsibility in his own person. The latter proposal he viewed as a violation of his own prerogative, founded upon open wrong. There was an injury, but no insult. On the other hand, to require of him the sacrifice of a servant, whose only offence had been in his fidelity to himself, was to expect that he should act collusively with those who sought to dishonor him. The absolute to el Rey of Spanish kings, in the last

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resort, seemed in Charles's eye indispensable to the dignity of the crown. And his legal counsellors assured him that, in conceding this point, he would degrade himself into a sort of upper constable, having some disagreeable functions, but none which could surround him with majestic attributes in the eyes of his subjects. Feeling thus, and thus advised, and religiously persuaded that he held his powers for the benefit of his people, so as to be under a deep moral incapacity to surrender one dowle' from his royal plumage, he did right to struggle with that energy and that cost of blood which marked his own personal war from 1642 to 1645. Now, on the other hand, we know, that nearly all the concessions sought from the king, and refused as mere treasonable demands, were subsequently re-affirmed, assumed into our constitutional law, and solemnly established for ever, about forty years later, by the Revolution of 1688-89. And this great event was in the nature of a compromise. For the patriots of 1642 had been betrayed into some capital errors, claims both irreconcilable with the dig nity of the crown, and useless to the people. This ought not to surprise us, and does not extinguish our debt of gratitude to those great men. Where has been the man, much less the party of men, that did not, in a first essay upon so difficult an adjustment as that of an equilibration between the limits of political forces, travel into some excesses? But forty years' experience - the restoration of a party familiar with the invaluable uses of royalty, and the harmonious cooperation of a new sovereign, already trained to a system of restraints, made this final settlement as near

to a perfect adjustment and compromise between all conflicting rights, as, perhaps, human wisdom could attain.

Now, from this English analogy, we may explain something of what is most essential in the Roman conflict. This great feature was common to the two cases

that the change sought by the revolutionary party was not an arbitrary change, but in the way of a natural nisus, working secretly throughout two or three generations. It was a tendency that would be denied. Just as, in the England of 1640, it is impossible to imagine that, under any immediate result whatever, ultimately the mere necessities of expansion in a people, ebullient with juvenile energies, and passing, at every decennium, into new stages of development, could have been gainsayed or much retarded. Had the nation embodied less of that stern political temperament, which leads eventually to extremities in action, it is possible that the upright and thoughtful character of the sovereign might have reconciled the Commons to expedients of present redress, and for twenty years the crisis might have been evaded. But the licentious character of Charles II. would inevitably have challenged the resumption of the struggle in a more embittered shape; for in the actual war of 1642, the separate resources of the crown were soon exhausted; and a deep sentiment of respect towards the king kept alive the principle of fidelity to the crown, through all the oscillations of the public mind. Under a stronger reaction against the personal sovereign, it is not absolutely impossible that the aristocracy might have come into the project of a republic. Whenever this body

stood aloof, and by alliance with the church, as well as with a very large section of the democracy, their non-adhesion to republican plans finally brought them to extinction. But the principle cannot be refused that the conflict was inevitable; that the collision could in no way have been evaded; and for the same reason as spoken so loudly in Rome - because the grievances to be redressed, and the incapacities to be removed, and the organs to be renewed, were absolute and urgent; that the evil grew out of the political system; that this system had generally been the silent product of time; and that as the sovereign, in the English case most conscientiously, so, on the other hand, in Rome, the Pompeian faction, with no conscience at all, stood upon the letter of usage and precedent, where the secret truth was that nature herself, that nature which works in political by change, by growth, by destruction, not less certainly than in physical organizations, had long been silently superannuating these precedents, and preparing the transition into forms more in harmony with public safety.

The capital fault in the operative constitution of Rome, had long been in the antinomies, if we may be pardoned for so learned a term, of the public service. It is not so true an expression-that anarchy was always to be apprehended, as, in fact that anarchy always subsisted. What made this anarchy more and less dangerous, was the personal character of the particular man militant for the moment; next, the variable interest which such a party might have staked upon the contest; and lastly, the variable means at his disposal towards public agitation. Fortunately for the

public safety, these forces, like all forces in this world. of compensations and of fluctuations, obeying steady laws, rose but seldom into the excess which menaced the framework of the state. Even in disorder, when long-continued, there is an order that can be calculated: dangers were foreseen; remedies were put into an early state of preparation. But because the evil had not been so ruinous as might have been predicted, it was not the less an evil, and it was not the less enormously increasing. The democracy retained a large class of functions, for which the original uses had been long extinct. Powers, which had utterly ceased to be available for interests of their own, were now used purely as the tenures by which they held a vested interest in bribery. The sums requisite for bribery were rising as the great estates rose. No man, even in a gentlemanly rank, no eques, no ancient noble even, unless his income were hyperbolically vast, or unless as the creature of some party in the background, could at length face the ruin of a political career. We do not speak of men anticipating a special resistance, but of those who stood in ordinary circumstances. Atticus is not a man whom we should cite for any authority in a question of principle, for we believe him to have been a dissembling knave, and the most perfect vicar of Bray extant; but in a question of prudence, his example is decisive. Latterly he was worth a hundred thousand pounds. Four-fifths of this sum, it is true, had been derived from a casual bequest; however, he had been rich enough, even in early life, to present all the poor citizens of Athens - probably twelve thousand families with a year's consumption for two individu