cal body. At the end of the seventeenth century the activity of the political body had been enormous, and the lethargy which followed was, therefore, peculiarly lasting. All the great questions of the Stuart period had been such as to awaken the minds of even the most sluggish classes. The question of the right of taxation touched every one who had a few shillings in his pocket. The question of control over religion touched every one who had an idea in his head. Both these questions were now set at rest. Any attempt to reawaken them by bringing the power of the State to exact taxation in new forms, as Walpole attempted to do by his Excise Bill, or even to interfere with the most absurd religious opinion, as the Whig Government in Anne's reign attempted to do by the prosecution of Sacheverell, roused a storm of indignation, which spread far beyond those classes which usually took part in political affairs. But as long as governments refrained from pushing their superabundant activity in these directions they found the mass, not merely of the nation, but even of the small minority which was possessed of the electoral franchise, singularly inert. In this inertness of the nation is to be found the key to the sudden downfall of the Tory party which accompanied the accession of the House of Hanover. That party had no doubt causes of weakness in itself. It had set out in the reign of Charles II. as the guardian of the two principles of hereditary right and of the supremacy of the Established Church. Each successive change had made it more difficult to maintain those principles intact, and at last the time had come when it had become absolutely impossible to maintain them together. The heir to the throne after Anne's death, according to the Tory system, was a Roman Catholic, and the Tories were therefore compelled to choose between loyalty to СНАР. IX. § 7. Ef facement of the Tory Party. СНАР. § 8. In fluence of a king who was likely to do all in his power to weaken the Church of their preference, and loyalty to a Church which would be likely to fare ill in the hands of the king of their preference. The course of events had placed them in a situation in which it was impossible for them to step forward with assurance. They were like the traveller who has arrived at a point where two roads diverge, and who cannot make up his mind which he prefers of the two destinations to which those roads respectively lead. In another respect, too, the Tories found their occupation gone. Even more than the Whigs, they had retained the distrust of the institution of a standing army which had resulted from the military despotism of the Cromwellian period. They had, therefore, gathered strength at the end of the two great wars in the reigns of William and Anne, which seemed likely to lead, as far as domestic politics were concerned, to the increase of the military power of the Crown. With the accession of George I. this danger ceased to be appreciable. If there were wars, they were not waged on a large scale. The prospect of danger to the institutions of the country was not merely averted by constitutional safeguards, such as the restriction of the Mutiny Act to a single year, but by the fact that the army was officered by members of the aristocracy and gentry, and had thus become a counterpart of the country itself. A government is in danger of military violence when its military institutions are on a different footing from its political institutions. The safety of England from this particular form of danger since the Revolution has lain in the substantial identity between the two. Though each has varied from time to time, they have always varied together. It is easy to ascribe the enormous influence of the aristocracy in those times to the restriction of the fran СНАР. Land chise, or to the ignorance in which electors were left of the debates and votes in parliament. In point of fact, the electoral body was weak in the reigns of the the large first two Georges precisely for the reason that the House owners. of Commons was weak in the reign of Henry VIII. It was content if parliament protected the persons of citizens from imprisonments without a fair trial, their purses from frequent and exorbitant demands, and their religion from meddlesome interference; whilst it cared little about the course of a legislation, which was founded on arguments, with respect to the very nature of which it was uninformed, and which, if so informed, it would have failed to comprehend. Naturally, therefore, the control over government fell into those hands which were qualified to exercise that control. The average voter cared very much to vote for his landlord, whom he respected or feared, very much to pocket a few extra guineas, or to drink large quantities of beer at the candidate's expense, very little for the measures which that candidate would support. Hence power fell almost exclusively into the hands of the class of large landowners, who were wise enough to avoid wounding the general feeling on those points on which alone it was susceptible. Hence the anomaly of the theoretic supremacy which the House of Commons exercised by means of its control over the purse, combined with the practical supremacy of the members of the House of Lords by means of the influence which they exercised over the election of members of the House of Commons. Like every other system which acquires power, this system was in its early days justified by its results. The aristocracy ruled, because it was at that time the fittest to rule. It entered into close connection with the mercantile classes, which had never risen to such importance before. It had the great bulk of the literature of the time on §9. The Whigs and the Dis senters. CHAP. its side. The one great name, the name of Swift, which was opposed to it, was opposed, so far as personal considerations were not involved in the matter, rather from opposition to its temporary aims than to its permanent policy. Originally the Whigs had thrown themselves on the side of toleration to the Dissenters, whilst the Tories who accepted the Revolution only assented to it as a political necessity. It was only natural that the Whigs should have been ready to grant more than toleration and to admit the Dissenters to political equality, allowing them to hold offices under the crown, and to occupy positions in the municipalities. The Tories, on the other hand, wished, by passing the Occasional Conformity Bill, to exclude from office even those Dissenters who were ready to take the sacrament in a church, though they afterwards returned to worship in their own chapels. The question was agitated in the reign of Anne. In the reign of George I. it was settled that the Toleration Act should be fully observed. Occasional conformists were to be admitted to office, whilst stubborn nonconformists remained excluded. Such a settlement, which let in the lax and the hypocritical, and shut out the honest and the sincere, would at the present day be rejected with contempt. It exactly satisfied the ideas of the men of the opening years of the eighteenth century. They were equally disinclined to persecute, and to submit themselves to those who were likely to persecute others. The apologue of Swift's 'Tale of a Tub' fairly represents the central thought of the time to which the moderate men of both parties, men like Harley and men like Walpole, inclined. The readiness to relieve Dissenters from persecution was perfectly consistent with an aversion to zeal and enthusiasm as a disturbing factor in human affairs. The seed sown by Chillingworth and Hales had grown up till it had become a great tree. Christianity was nothing if it was not rational. Its life and vigour, its high enthusiasm, were all laid aside. The Church of the eighteenth century would have been a strange Church to St. Francis or to Oliver Cromwell. Men argued of the suitability of the scriptural promises to the needs of life, sometimes, like Bishop Butler, with a high idea of duty and lovingkindness before them; sometimes with the mere thought of skilfully adjusting formulas into a pleasant scheme. Others carried the argument further, and the Deists conceived the idea of a beneficent Creator who had ordained all things in a world in which no account need be taken of the disturbing elements of sorrow and sin. But whatever might be the special view arrived at, the characteristic of the age was the predominance of reason without active energy for the common good. The old tyrannies were gone, and the new effort after a better order had not yet come. CHAP. IX. The § 10. HoRiot garth and Fielding. Life was not beautiful under this regimen. streets of London were as Hogarth painted them. and anarchy were there, controlled, so far as they were controlled at all, by practical common sense, and by something remaining of the Puritan morality without the Puritan enthusiasm. Hogarth's industrious apprentice going to church instead of gambling on the tombstones outside, taking care to attend to his master's accounts, and finally marrying his master's daughter, is the eighteenth century outcome of the religion of Baxter and Owen. Fielding's novels tell the same tale. There is no sense of natural or artistic beauty in them, no enthusiasm, no feeling for the nobleness of temperance and chastity. But there is a certain level of morality below which they never sink. If they lay stress on the unhealthy animalism of human nature, they do not depict that hot-bed of intrigue and corruption, that sty |