STATE OF ENGLAND IN 1685 .

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CHAPTER III.

I intend , in this chapter, to give a description of the'statein -which England was at the time when the crown passed fromCharles the Second to his brother. Such a description, com-posed from scanty and dispersed materials, must necessarilybe very imperfect. Yet it may perhaps correct some falsenotions which would make the subsequent narrative unintelli-gible or uninstructive.

If we would study with profit the history of our ancestors,we must be constantly on our guard against that delusion whichthe well known names of families, places, and offices natural! yproduce, and must never forget that the country of which weread was a very different country from that in which we live.In every experimental science there is a tendency towardsperfection. In every human being there is a wish to ame-liorate his own condition. These two principles have oftensufficed, even when counteracted by great public calamitiesand by bad institutions, to carry civilisation rapidly forward.No ordinary misfortune, no ordinary misgovernment, will doso much to make a nation wretched, as the constant progressof physical knowledge and the constant effort of every man tobetter himself will do to make a nation prosperous. It hasoften been found that profuse expenditure, heavy taxation,absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrouswars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundations,have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertionsof private citizens have been able to create it. It can easily beproved that, in our own land, the national wealth has, duringat least six centuries, been almost uninterruptedly increasing;that it was greater under the Tudors than under the Planta-genets; that it was greater under the Stuarts than under the

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