CHAP.
IX.

of falsity and obscenity, in which the dramatists of the
Restoration revelled. Such books serve to hold up
the mirror to the time. They were days in which
individual energies were strong, and the thought of
devotion to public ends was weak. The Puritan ideal and
the Royalist ideal had been alike trodden in the dust.
The Englishman was proud of his constitution because
it guarded the individual Englishman from interference ;
because he could not, like the Frenchman, be hurried off
to the Bastille without warning or trial; because it
enabled him to eat beef like the representative islander
in Hogarth's picture of 'Calais Gate,' instead of eating
nothing better than soup and frogs. To those who look
back upon the scene, it does not appear so entirely lovely
as it did to contemporaries. The rude energy with which
the actors shouldered their way through the crowd,
making full use of all the advantages that personal
strength of body, or the possession of a purse full of
guineas, or broad acres of landed estate might give
them, must have fallen with terrible weight upon the
weaker members of society. In such a world the rich
man took his pleasure, swearing and cursing and
drinking himself into the gout as he went.
The poor

man swore and cursed too, with Gin Lane as a solace,
and the misery of the gaol or a speedy exit from life at
Tyburn before him. Yet unlovely as the spectacle was,
it had its promise of better things. Rude and uncul-
tivated as this life was, it was full of activity. The evils
which men suffered from they brought on themselves.
No tyranny of class over class handed down by the tra-
dition of centuries, as in France, no servile yoke of in-
justice, presses upon the citizen or the cultivator of the
soil. If the people can but make up their minds about
their own wrongs, those wrongs will be redressed. To-
day it is a prosecution of Dr. Sacheverell or an un-

popular Excise Bill or a rectification of the Almanac, which rouses the opposition. Some wiser cry for right and justice will be heard to-morrow, and men will learn that the struggles of the seventeenth century had not been in vain, and that a nation which has grasped the direction of its own destinies will not always be content to leave the helm in the hands of a place-loving aristocracy.

CHAP.

IX.

176

CHAPTER X.

CHAP.
X.

monitions

of Change.

THE RESTORATION OF AUTHORITY.

IT was certain that some day or other, the time would come when such an abnegation of the higher duties of

§ 1. Pre- government would be met by a demand for a development of authority which might discipline into obedience to the national will the factions which profited by the existing anarchy. In some sort, the situation was what it had been when a stronger, fiercer aristocracy treated England as its own in the days of Stephen, or in the days of Henry VI. But as the evil was present in a milder form, the remedy was also likely to take a milder form. The king, as the representative of unity in government, would have a good chance of raising his own power, if he knew how to wield it for national purposes, but he would not this time have the mass of the nation looking on with dumb respect. It would claim to act with him or without him according to the way in which he exercised the authority which he claimed. Not, indeed, that the overthrow of the predominance of the aristocracy would come from a mere jealousy of their supremacy. It is not in this way that great constitutional changes are effected. There must be some actual sin of omission or of commission on the part of the rulers to stir up a desire for change, before a strong enough movement manifests itself in the minds of the multitudes by whose union alone the

forms of popular government can be filled with the lifegiving spirit of popular action.

It was well that the first motion towards a better order should make itself felt in the domain of religion rather than in that of politics. The thought of the time had little reference to action, and none at all to spiritual ardour and emotion. Around the thinkers who speculated on the comfortable results of the Christian scheme were a large number of clergy who did not speculate at all, but who contented themselves with fulfilling the external functions of their office in a more or less respectable way, without dreaming that it was their duty to utter more than a mild protest against the evils around them. The one word which expressed to them all that was to be avoided was the word 'zeal.' They were in the midst of masses who were mere heathens, living lives utterly brutal and degraded, and they passed on their way as if these things had no existence. John Wesley saw the sight with other eyes. He gave his life to raise these very masses to a higher and a nobler life. There was in his teaching nothing new. It was the old Puritan doctrine of conversion, upon which was grafted the practice of confession from the yet older church, stripped of its sacerdotalism, and assuming a democratic form in the class-meetings by means of which he organised his followers. In his hands the old thing had become new. His work was more than to teach and to organise. It was to quicken into vigour the seeds of spiritual life which had been almost smothered under the oppressive reasoning of the philosopher and the careless self-content of the man of the world. From it sprang the work of the later evangelical leaders within the English Church, and indirectly the whole spiritual teaching of men who would be by no

N

CHAP.

X.

§ 2. Wesleyanism.

CHAP.
X.

$ 3. William Pitt.

means inclined to trace their mental genealogy to the founder of Wesleyanism.

What Wesley was in the region of mind and spirit, William Pitt was in the region of politics. He too brought nothing new in the way of intellectual conception. His ruling idea of antagonism to France was as old as the days of Edward III. and of Henry V. It was enshrined in the historic drama of Shakspere, and it inspired the foreign policy of the Whigs of the Revolution. When he tried to solve the questions evolved by the resistance of America to English taxation, he fell back on the old doctrine of No taxation without representation, which had been heard in the midst of the Puritan revolution. Pitt's strength lay in his character, not in his ideas. The spectacle of a man who set before him noble ends, and who trusted his countrymen above that which they were able to do, roused them to do more than they had done before. The first step in organisation is to rally round a man, and in Pitt, England had at last found the man to whom it could look up. It was only to be expected that that rally should have been the accompaniment of a great war. It is for the purposes of war that the need of leadership is most promptly felt, and that need which at an earlier stage of civilisation is satisfied by a quick eye and a brave heart in the field, demands, when war is spread over a larger field, a quick eye and a brave heart in the cabinet. The successes of the Seven Years' War, the conquest of Canada, and the establishment of English military power in India were the distinct results of the individual energy and vigour which the race had gained by its development in the seventeenth century. Frenchmen, in spite of such glorious exceptions as Montcalm and Dupleix, were through their long training under an absolute monarchy, unfitted to compete with the great-grandchildren of the