The very great length to which this article has already been extended, renders it impossi ble for us to discuss, as we had meant to do, the characters and conduct of the leading Eng lish statesmen at this crisis. But we must offer a few remarks on the spirit and tendency of the Revolution of 1688.

to imagine how even this writer can have read and transcribed the Declaration of Right, and yet have so utterly misconceived its nature. That famous document is, as its very name imports, declaratory, and not remedial. It was never meant to be a measure of reform. It neither contained, nor was designed to contain, any allusion to those innovations which the authors of the Revolution considered as desirable, and which they speedily proceeded to make. The Declaration was merely a recital of certain old and wholesome laws which had been violat

tive was exerted on their side-that when they | vast royal power which three years before had preached endurance, they had nothing to en- seemed immovably fixed, vanished at once dure that when they declared it unlawful to like chaff in a hurricane. resist evil, none but Whigs and Dissenters suffered any evil. It had never occurred to him that a man feels the calamities of his enemies with one sort of sensibility, and his own with quite a different sort. It had never occurred to him as possible that a reverend divine might think it the duty of Baxter and Bunyan to bear insults, and to lie in dungeons without murmur- The editor of this volume quotes the Decla ing; and yet, when he saw the smallest chance ration of Right, and tells us, that by looking at that his own prebend might be transferred to it, we may "judge at a glance whether the ausome sly Father from Italy or Flanders, might thors of the Revolution achieved all they might begin to discover much matter for useful medi- and ought, in their position, to have achieved tation in the texts touching Ehud's knife and whether the Commons of England did their Jael's hammer. His majesty was not aware, duty to their constituents, their country, posteit should seem, that people do sometimes re-rity, and universal freedom." We are at a loss consider their opinions, and that nothing more disposes a man to reconsider his opinions than a suspicion that, if he adheres to them, he is very likely to be a beggar or a martyr. Yet it seems strange that these truths should have escaped the royal mind. Those Churchmen who had signed the Oxford declaration in favour of passive obedience had also signed the thirty-nine articles. And yet the very man who confidently expected that, by a little coaxing and bullying, he should induce them to renounce the articles, was thunderstruck when he found that they were disposed to softened by the Stuarts; and a solemn protest against down the doctrines of the declaration. Nor did it necessarily follow that even if the theory of the Tories had undergone no modification, their practice would coincide with their theory. It might, one should think, have crossed the mind of a man of fifty, who had seen a great deal of the world, that people sometimes do what they think wrong. Though a prelate might hold that Paul directs us to obey even a Nero, it might not, on that account, be perfect-tain what that constitution really is. This was ly safe to treat the Right Reverend Father in God after the fashion of Nero, in the hope that he would continue to obey on the principles of Paul. The king indeed had only to look at home. He was at least as much attached to the Catholic Church as any Tory gentleman or clergyman could be to the Church of England. Adultery was at least as strongly condemned by his Church as resistance by the Church of England. Yet his priests could not keep him from Arabella Sedley. While he was risking his crown for the sake of his soul, he was risking his soul for the sake of an ugly, dirty mistress. There is something delightfully grotesque in the spectacle of a man who, while living in the habitual violation of his own known duties, is unable to believe that any temptation can draw any other person aside from the path of virtue.

the validity of any precedent which might be set up in opposition to those laws. The words, as quoted by the writer himself, ran thus: "They do claim, demand, and insist upon all and singular the premises as their undoubted rights and liberties." Before a man begins to make improvements on his estate, he must know its boundaries. Before a legislature sits down to reform a constitution, it is fit to ascer

all that the declaration intended to do; and to quarrel with it because it did not directly introduce any beneficial changes, is to quarrel with meat for not being clothing.

The principle on which the authors of the Revolution acted cannot be mistaken. They were perfectly aware that the English institu tions stood in need of reform. But they also knew that an important point was gained if they could settle, once for all, by a solemn compact, the matters which had, during several generations, been in controversy between the Parliament and the crown. They therefore most judiciously abstained from mixing up the irritating and perplexing question of what ought to be the law, with the plain question of what was the law. As to the claims set forth in the Declaration of Right, there was little room for debate. Whigs and Tories were generally agreed as to the legality of the dispensing power, and of taxation imposed by the roya

James was disappointed in all his calculations. His hope was, that the Tories would follow their principles, and that the Noncon-prerogative. The articles were therefore ad formists would follow their interests. Exactly the reverse took place. The Tories sacrificed the principle of non-resistance to their interests: the Nonconformists rejected the delusive offers of the king, and stood firmly by their principles. The two parties whose strife had convulsed the empire during half a century, were united for a moment; and all that

justed in a very few days. But if the Parlia ment had determined to revise the whole con stitution, and to provide new securities against misgovernment, before proclaiming the new sovereigns, months would have been lost in disputes. The coalition which had delivered the country would have been instantly dis solved. The Whigs would have quarreled

And what were the reforms of which we speak? We will shortly recount some which we think the most important; and we will then leave our readers to judge whether those who consider the Revolution as a mere change of dynasty, beneficial to a few aristocrats, but useless to the body of the people, or those who consider it as a glorious and happy era in the history of the British nation and of the human species, have judged more correctly of its nature.

with the Tories, the Lords with the Commons, | this-that William would in all things conform the Church with the Dissenters; and all this himself to what should appear to be the fixed storm of conflicting interests and conflicting and deliberate sense of his Parliament. The theories would have been raging round a va- security for the performance was this-that he cant throne. In the mean time, the greatest had no claim to the throne cxcept the choice power on the continent was attacking our al- of Parliament, and no means of maintaining lies, and meditating a descent on our own ter- himself on the throne but the support of Par ritories. Dundee was raising the Highlands. liament. All the great and inestimable re The authority of James was still owned by the forms which speedily followed the Revolution Irish. If the authors of the Revolution had were implied in those simple words,-"The been fools enough to take this course, we have Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, little doubt that Luxembourg would have been assembled at Westminster, do resolve that upon them in the middle of their constitution- William and Mary, Prince and Princess of making. They might probably have been in- Orange, be, and be declared King and Queen terrupted in a debate on Filmer's and Sydney's of England." theories of government, by the entrance of the musketeers of Louis's household; and have been marched off, two and two, to frame imaginary monarchies and commonwealths in the Tower. We have had in our time abundant experience of the effects of such folly. We have seen nation after nation enslaved, because the friends of liberty wasted on discussions upon abstract points the time which ought to have been employed in preparing for vigorous national defence. The editor, apparently, would have had the English Revolution of 1688 end as the Revolutions of Spain and Naples ended in our days. Thank God, our deliverers were men of a very different order from the Spanish and Neapolitan legislators! They might, on many subjects, hold opinions which, in the nineteenth century, would not be considered as liberal; but they were not dreaming pedants. They were statesmen accustomed to the management of great affairs. Their plans of reform were not so extensive as those of the lawgivers of Cadiz; but what they planned, they effected! and what they effected, that they maintained against the fiercest hostility at home and abroad.

First in the list of the benefits which our country owes to the Revolution we place the Toleration Act. It is true that this measure fell short of the wishes of the leading Whigs. It is true also that, where Catholics were concerned, even the most enlightened of the leading Whigs held opinions by no means so liberal as those which are happily common at the present day. Those distinguished statesmen did, however, make a noble, and, in some respects, a successful struggle for the rights of conscience. Their wish was to bring the great body of the Protestant Dissenters within the pale of the Church, by judicious alterations in the liturgy and the articles; and to grant to those who still remained without that pale the most ample toleration. They framed a plan of comprehension which would have satisfied a great majority of the seceders; and they proposed the complete abolition of that absurd and odious test which, after having been for a century and a half a scandal to the pious, and a laughing-stock to the profane, was at length removed in our own time. The immense power of the clergy and of the Tory gentry frustrated these excellent designs. The Whigs, however, did much. They succeeded in obtaining a law, in the provisions of which a philosopher will doubtless find much to condemn, but which had the practical effect of enabling almost every Protestant nonconformist to follow the dictates of his own conscience without molestation. Scarcely a law in the statute-book is theoretically more objec tionable than the Toleration Act. But we question whether in the whole of that mass of legislation, from the Great Charter downwards, there be a single law which has so much di

Their first object was to seat William on the throne; and they were right. We say this without any reference to the eminent personal qualities of William, or to the follies and crimes of James. If the two princes had interchanged characters, our opinion would have still been the same. It was even more necessary to England at the time that her king should be a usurper than that he should be a hero. There could be no security for good government without a change of dynasty. The reverence for hereditary right and the doctrine of passive obedience had taken such a hold on the minds of the Tories that, if James had been restored to power on any conditions, their attachment to him would in all probability have revived, as the indignation which recent oppression had produced faded from their minds. It had become indispensable to have a sovereign whose title to his throne was strictly bound up with the title of the nation to its liberties. In the compact between the Prince of Orange and the Convention, there was one most important article which, though not ex-minished the sum of human suffering,-which pressed, was perfectly understood by both parties, and for the performance of which the country had securities far better than all the Vows that Charles I. or Ferdinand VII. ever took in the day of their weakness, and broke In the day of their power. The article was

has done so much to allay bad passions,which has put an end to so much petty tyran ny and vexation,-which has brought glad ness, peace, and a sense of security to so many private dwellings.

The second of those great reforms which the

Revolution produced was the final establish- settled on him taxes estimated to produce ment of the Presbyterian Kirk in Scotland. £1,200,000 a year. This they thought suffi. We shall not now inquire whether the Episco- cient, as they allowed nothing for a standing pal or the Calvinistic form of church govern- army in time of peace. At the time of Charles's ment be more agreeable to primitive practice. death, the annual produce of these taxes cer Far be it from us to disturb with our doubts tainly exceeded a million and a half; and the the repose of an Oxonian Bachelor of Divinity, | king who, during the years which immediately who conceives that the English prelates, with followed his accession, was perpetually in distheir baronies and palaces, their purple and tress, and perpetually asking his Parliaments their fine linen, their mitred carriages and for money, was at last able to keep a consider their sumptuous tables, are the true successors able body of regular troops without any as and exact resemblances of those ancient bish-sistance from the House of Commons. If his ops who lived by catching fish and mending reign had been as long as that of George the tents. We only say that the Scotch, doubtless Third, he would probably before the close of from their own inveterate stupidity and malice, it have been in the annual receipt of severa were not Episcopalians; that they could not millions over and above what the ordinary ex be made Episcopalians; that the whole power penses of the state required; and of those mil. of government had been in vain employed for lions he would have been as absolutely master the purpose of converting them; that the full- as the king now is of the sum allowed for his est instruction on the mysterious questions of privy-purse. He might have spent them in the Apostolical succession, and the imposition luxury, in corruption, in paying troops to overof hands, had been imparted to them by the awe his people, or in carrying into effect wild very logical process of putting the legs of the schemes of foreign conquest. The authors of students into wooden boots, and driving two or the Revolution applied a remedy to this great more wedges between their knees; that a abuse. They settled on the king, not the fluccourse of divinity lectures, of the most edify-tuating produce of certain fixed taxes, but a ing kind, had been given in the Grass-market fixed sum sufficient for the support of his own of Edinburgh; yet that, in spite of all the exertions of those great theological professors, Lauderdale and Dundee, the Covenanters were as obstinate as ever. The contest between the Scotch nation and the Anglican Church had produced near thirty years of the most fright-vice specified in the vote. The direct effect of ful misgovernment ever seen in any part of Great Britain. If the Revolution had produced no other effect than that of freeing the Scotch from the yoke of an establishment which they detested, and giving them one to which they were attached, it would have been one of the happiest events in our history.

royal state. They established it as a rule, that all the expenses of the army, the navy, and the ordnance, should be brought annually under the review of the House of Commons, and that every sum voted should be applied to the ser.

this change was important. The indirect ef fect has been more important still. From that time the House of Commons has been realy the paramount power in the state. It has, in truth, appointed and removed ministers, declared war, and concluded peace. No combi nation of the king and the Lords has ever been able to effect any thing against the Lower House, backed by its constituents. Three or four times, indeed, the sovereign has been able to break the force of an opposition, by dissolving the Parliament. But if that experiment should fail, if the people should be of the same mind with their representatives - he would clearly have no course left but to yield, to abdicate, or to fight.

The third great benefit which the country derived from the Revolution was the alteration in the mode of granting the supplies. It had been the practice to settle on every prince, at the commencement of his reign, the produce of certain taxes, which, it was supposed, would yield a sum sufficient to defray the ordinary expenses of government. The distribution of the revenue was left wholly to the sovereign. He might be forced by war, or by his own pro- The next great blessing which we owe to fusion, to ask for an extraordinary grant. But, the Revolution, is the purification of the ad if his policy were economical and pacific, he ministration of justice in political cases. of might reign many years without once being the importance of this change, no person can under the necessity of summoning his Parlia- judge who is not well acquainted with the earment, or of taking their advice when he had lier volumes of the State Trials. Those vo summoned them. This was not all. The na- lumes are, we do not hesitate to say, the most tural tendency of every society, in which pro- frightful record of baseness and depravity that perty enjoys tolerable security, is to increase is extant in the world. Our hatred is altoin wealth. With the national wealth, the pro-gether turned away from the crimes and the duce of the customs, the excise, and the postoffice, would of course increase; and thus it might well happen, that taxes which, at the beginning of a long reign, were barely sufficient to support a frugal government in time of peace, might, before the end of that reign, enable the sovereign to imitate the extravagance of Nero or Heliogabalus,-to raise great armies to carry on expensive wars. Something of this sort had actually happened under Charles the Second, though his reign lasted only twenty-five years. His first Parliament

criminals, and directed against the law and its ministers. We see villanies as black as ever were imputed to any prisoner at any bar, daily committed on the bench and in the jury-box. The worst of the bad acts which brought discredit on the old Parliaments of France,-the condemnation of Lally, for example, or even that of Calas,-may seem praiseworthy when compared with those which follow each other in endless succession, as we turn over hat huge chronicle of the shame of England. The magistrates of Paris and Toulouse were blind

oner had existed, with rare and short intermis- which has generally been most disposed to sions, under every government, monarchical magnify the prerogative, a great change took or republican, from the time of Henry VIII. place. Bishopric after bishopric, and deanery downwards, expired, and has never since been after deanery, were bestowed on Whigs and renewed. Latitudinarians. The consequence was, that Whigism and Latitudinarianism were professed by the ablest and most aspiring churchmen.

Hume has complained bitterly of this at the close of his history. "The Whig party," says he, "for a course of near seventy years, has almost without interruption enjoyed the whole authority of government, and no honours or cffices could be obtained but by their countenance and protection. But this event, which in some particulars has been advantageous to the state, nas proved destructive to the truth of history, and has established many gross falsehocds, which it is unaccountable how any civilized nation could have embraced with re gard to its domestic occurrences. Compositions the most despicable, both for style an matter" (in a note he instances Locke, Sydney, F.oadley, and Rapin) "have been extolled and

We are aware that the great improvements which we have recapitulated were, in many respects, imperfectly and unskilfully executed. The authors of those improvements sometimes, while they removed or mitigated a great practical evil, continued to recognise the erroneous principle from which that evil had sprung. Sometimes, when they had adopted a sound principle, they shrank from following it to all the conclusions to which it would have le them. Sometimes they failed to perceive that the remedies which they applied to one disease of the state were certain to generate another disease, and to render another remedy necessary. Their knowledge was inferior to ours; nor were they always able to act up to their knowledge. The pressure of circumstances, the necessity of compromising differences of opinion, the power and violence of the party which was altogether hostile to the new settle-propagated and read as if they had equalled the ment, must be taken into the account. When these things are fairly weighed, there will, we think, be little difference of opinion among liberal and right-minded men as to the real value of what the great events of 1688 did for this country.

most celebrated remains of antiquity. And forgetting that a regard to liberty, though a laudable passion, ought commonly to be subservient to a reverence for established government, the prevailing faction has celebrated only the partisans of the former." We will not here enter into an argument about the merit of Rapin's history, or Locke's political speculations. We call Hume merely as evidence to a fact well known to all reading men, that the literature patronised by the English court and the English ministry, during the first half of the eighteenth century, was of that kind which courtiers and min sters generally do all in their power to discountenance, and tended to inspire zeal for the liberties of the people rather than respect for the authority of the government.

We have recounted what appear to us the most important of those changes which the Revolution produced in our laws. The changes which it produced in our laws, however, were not more important than the change which it indirectly produced in the public mind. The Whig party had, during seventy years, an almost uninterrupted possession of power. It had always been the fundamental doctrine of that party, that power is a trust for the people; that it is given to magistrates, not for their own, but for the public advantage; that, where it is abused by magistrates, even by the highest There was still a very strong Tory party in of all, it may lawfully be withdrawn. It is England. But that party was in opposition. perfectly true, that the Whigs were not more Many of its members still held the doctrine of exempt than other men from the vices and in-passive obedience. But they did not admit firmities of our nature, and that, when they had that the existing dynasty had any claim to such power, they sometimes abused it. But still obedience. They condemned resistance. But they stood firm to their theory. The theory by resistance they meant the keeping out of was the badge of their party. It was some- James III., and not the turning out of George II. thing more. It was the foundation on which | No Radical of our times could grumble more rested the power of the houses of Nassau and Brunswick. Thus, there was a government interested in propagating a class of opinions which most governments are interested in disocuraging, a government which looked with complacency on all speculations tending to democracy, and with extreme aversion on all speculations favourable to arbitrary power. There was a king who decidedly preferred a republican to a believer in the divine right of kings; who considered every attempt to exalt his prerogative as an attack on his title; and who reserved all his favours for those who declaimed on the natural equality of men and the popular origin of government. This was the state of things from the Revolution till the death of George II. The effect was what might have been expected. Even in that profession we should set him down for something mor

at the expenses of the royal household, could exert himself more strenuously to reduce the military establishment, could oppose with more earnestness every proposition for arming the executive with extraordinary powers, or could pour more unmitigated abuse on placemen and courtiers. If a writer were now, in a massive Dictionary, to define a Pensioner as a traitor and a slave, the Excise as a hateful tax, the Commissioners of the excise as wretches,—if he were to write a satire full of reflections on men who receive "the price of boroughs and of souls," who "explain their country's dear bought rights away," or

"whom pensions can incite To vote a patriot black, a courtier white,"