WILLIAM AND HAEY.

245

CHAPTER XHI.

The violence of revolutions is generally proportioned to the chap.degree of the maladministration which has produced them. It 1G8 ,,' -is therefore not strange that the government of Scotland, having ti.o Re-been during many years far more oppressive and corrupt than more'vio-the government of England, should have fallen with a farg”^^^heavier ruin. The movement against the last king of theHouse of Stuart was in England conservative, in Scotland de-structive. The English complained, not of the law, but of theviolation of the law. They rose up against the first magistratemerely in order to assert the supremacy of the law. They werefor the most part strongly attached to the Church establishedby law. Even in applying that extraordinary remedy to which anextraordinary emergency compelled them to have recourse, theydeviated as little as possible from the ordinary methods pre-scribed by the law. The Convention which met at West-minster, though summoned by irregular writs, was constitutedon the exact model of a regular Parliament. No man was in-vited to the Upper House whose right to sit there was not clear.

The knights and burgesses were chosen by those electors whowould have been entitled to choose the members of a House ofCommons called under the great seal. The franchises of theforty shilling freeholder, of the householder paying scot andlot, of the burgage tenant, of the liveryman of London, of theMaster of Arts of Oxford, were respected. The sense of theconstituent bodies was taken with as little violence on the partof mobs, with as little trickery on the part of returning officers,as at any general election of that age. When at length the