448

HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

chap, sobriety, and with such minute attention to prescriptive eti-ie8 g"- quette, by the terrible name of Revolution.

And yet this revolution, of all revolutions the least violent,has been of all revolutions the most beneficent. It finallydecided the great question whether the popular element whichhad, ever since the age of Fitzwalter andDe Montfort, beenfound in the English polity, should be destroyed by the mo-narchical element, or should be suffered to develope itselffreely, and to become dominant. The strife between thetwo principles had been long, fierce, and doubtful. It hadlasted through four reigns. It had produced seditions, im-peachments, rebellions, battles, sieges, proscriptions, ju-dicial massacres. Sometimes liberty, sometimes royalty, hadseemed to be on the point of perishing. During many yearsone half of the energy of England had been employed incounteracting the other half. The executive power and thelegislative power had so effectually impeded each other thatthe state had been of no account in Europe. The King atArms, who proclaimed William and Mary before WhitehallGate, did in truth announce that this great struggle was over;that there was entire union between the throne and the Par-liament; that England, long dependent and degraded, wasagain a power of the first rank; that the ancient laws bywhich the prerogative was bounded would thenceforth beheld as sacred as the prerogative itself, and would be fol-lowed out to all their consequences; that the executive ad-ministration would be conducted in conformity with the senseof the representatives of the nation; and that no reform,which the two Houses should, after mature deliberation, pro-pose, would be obstinately withstood by the sovereign. TheDeclaration of Right, though it made nothing law which hadnot been law before, contained the germ of the law whichgave religious freedom to the Dissenter, of the law whichsecured the independence of the Judges, of the law whichlimited the duration of Parliaments, of the law which placedthe liberty of the press under the protection of juries, of thelaw which prohibited the slave trade, of the law which abo-