some to save many. This is what is most terrible in revolutions; after the fact it is terrible to all; it is terrible at the time only to the weaker or more delicate spirits. These birds of calm are caught by the storm and drowned while doubting. Not so the real leaders of revolutions. They ride upon the storm. They see but as the lightning flashes. To them the lesser evil seems a transcendent good. Charles had hoped by his intrigues to crush Cromwell; he failed; and Cromwell thenceforth looked upon him as hopelessly false; as one who was destitute of that sense of truth between man and man, which was a necessity of political life. Such a man, if a ruler, he held, must be dealt with by banishment or by death, as an incurable evil of the commonwealth. His was a stern mind, and a mind into which an idea of privilege did not enter. There was with him no respect of persons. If he had no mercy on Lilburne's misguided Leveller, who endangered the fidelity of a regiment, he was as severe to the prince, who endangered the liberty of the country. Such a mind, intensely confident of its own sense of justice, never recoiled from its conclusion. If it could not draw back, still less could it conceal its purpose. As it abhorred secret murder, so it abhorred that lingering murder, which, while it shrinks from taking away life, shrinks not from taking away the means of life. If Charles was to die, it could not be by the lingering death Charles himself had assigned to Eliot. There was no secrecy in Cromwell's dealing with prince or private; the one was given over to martial law before the eyes of his comrades; the other was given as openly to no less stern inquisitors of blood. The world, however, has not judged as Cromwell did. And, though on grounds of abstract justice, it is hard to say why a king deserves a mercy which he has denied to his subjects, yet many faults will be forgiven to those who have had the difficult task of governing others. Among the causes which have won an excess of sympathy for Charles, we observe the natural pity for the greatness of the fall, a disinclination to judge hardly of the fallen, but, above all, the deep-rooted sentiment of loyalty, which the restriction of prerogative has itself attached to the king, by making his throne the ideal element of the constitution, and thus so raising him above parties, that when his ministers do well, he receives the honour, when ill, he can restore, or even increase, his own popularity by ridding himself of his advisers. 1649.] CAUSES OF SYMPATHY. 247 Besides these general considerations, it will be remembered that the interpreter of his times for all the generations before our own, has been one who wrote in the full tide of the reaction, and who, as is now known, has not shrunk on occasion from suppressing truth, in his endeavour to palliate the faults of one side or blacken those of the other. The historian has been seconded so ably by the painter and novelist, that a Cavalier has been held the type of all that is noble, and a patriot of all that is mean. It will be noticed that the two classes by whom Charles has been most admired, have been the clergy, who may have been unconsciously biassed by a not unnatural antipathy to the religious theories of his opponents; and those whose lives have brought them least in contact with public interests: these have judged him as one of their own society, and have been carried away by the many virtues of his private life, his courage in the field, his tender nature and his piety, as well as by the noble attitude in which these qualities sustained him at his death. Those, on the other hand, who have interested themselves deeply in the cause of the people, must perforce judge public men by what they have done for the nation. In their roll of martyrs will come not Charles, who died from reluctance to abandon boldly a prerogative which had been proved to be untenable and pernicious, but Eliot, who died in defence of the necessary rights of the Commons' house, and the ransacking of whose most secret papers has only proved more clearly what was clear before, that the only ends he aimed at were his country's, his God's, and truth's. Those who look to national interests will hold that the first intellectual virtue of a ruler is an insight into the spirit of his time and the first moral virtue, a sympathy with his people's hopes and fears. As men may be too good fathers, if they use patronage as a vehicle of nepotism, so kings are too good husbands, when they give or withhold their consent to the nation's wishes according to the tempers or caprices of their wives, and too good churchmen, when they put one half of their subjects without the pale of toleration. This is not the sense in which, with kings, as with others, "England expects every man to do his duty.” CHAPTER XI. SOCIAL STATE OF ENGLAND. Οἴσθ ̓ οὖν ὅτι καὶ ἀνθρώπων εἴδη τοσαῦτα ἀνάγκη τρόπων εἶναι, ὅσαπερ καὶ πολιτειῶν ; ἢ οἴει ἐκ δρυός ποθεν ἤ ἐκ πέτρας τὰς πολιτείας γίγνεσθαι, ἀλλ' οὐχὶ ἐκ τῶν ἠθῶν τῶν ἐν ταῖς πόλεσιν, ἃ ἂν ὥσπερ ῥέψαντα τάλλα ἐφελκύσηται. You are doubtless aware that the varieties of human character must in volve a corresponding number of constitutions. Or do you think that the constitutions we see are foundlings from the woods and rocks, and not the legitimate offspring of the moral dispositions of the members of each State which, so to speak, turn the scale, carrying the whole balance with them?— PLATO, REP., vii. 2. THE population of England, now over three and twenty millions, and increasing two more every decade, numbered, in the middle of the seventeenth century, but about five and a half millions. Commerce was too insufficiently extended, too little of the soil had been brought under cultivation, too little science introduced into the processes of manufacture and agriculture, for the country to provide food or employment for a large number of inhabitants. The largest and most important trading towns were in the southern half of the kingdom. London contained about 500,000 inhabitants, a sixth of its present population. The population of Bristol, the next place to London in size, was not 30,000. The large manufacturing towns in the north were just beginning to rise into importance. Sheffield, where knives were made, contained between 2000 and 3000 inhabitants; Leeds, a great seat of the woollen manufacture, between 3000 and 4000; 5000 or 6000 formed the population of Manchester, where cotton, imported from Cyprus and Smyrna, had been manufactured for the last thirty or forty years. It is now acknowledged that the result of granting to persons or classes special privileges for the conduct of any trade or manufacture can only be to destroy competition and so raise prices to the injury of the consumers, for the supposed or real advantage SOCIAL STATE MONOPOLIES. 243 of a few. Nor is this the whole of the evil. Wages can only -come out of capital, and when capital lies idle and is checked in its natural growth by a narrowing of the market and an artificial enhancement of price, then wages are checked as well. In the seventeenth century, however, these principles were Trade and not understood, and trade was shackled by restrictions, commerce. imposed sometimes by the Executive, sometimes by the Legisla ture. The monopolies granted by Elizabeth, James I., and Charles I. were especially injurious, because the owners of each patent were so few, that they were enabled, by combining together, to force upon the consumer a bad article, and at the same time to raise its price and tax the public for their own benefit. Though the granting of monopolies was forbidden by statute law in James' last Parliament (1623), the practice was continued until the Scotch war, when Charles recalled all patents, in the hope of regaining some of the popularity he had lost. Though, in this case, the evils of interference were very clearly felt and seen, yet there was no perception of the principle that trade flourishes most when left alone; and the interference of Parliament was often invoked to protect both producers and traders against their own countrymen and against foreigners. For instance, indigo was brought from the Indies to Europe, and was soon largely employed in the place of woad for dyeing cloth, as the dye was richer, and the process cheaper; but when farmers, merchants, and carriers, engaged in the woad trade, found their employment decreasing, they raised a loud outcry against the new dye, saying that it injured the material of the cloth on this the governments in England, Germany, and France forbade the use of indigo, branding it with the name of the 'Devil's dye.' An act, passed in England to this effect, under Elizabeth, remained in force until the reign of Charles II., so that the price of cloth was artificially raised, for nearly a century, through the interference of the government. Nations, like individuals, gain by being allowed to interchange their goods freely. Each can then expend its labour and capital upon those branches of industry for which it possesses special advantages, while it has its own wants supplied at the least possible cost, by taking from other nations those products which they can supply more cheaply than itself. For these imports the nation pays by exporting, in exchange, the superfluity of its own special pro ducts. Legislators of the seventeenth century believed, however in the mercantile system, which assumed that money was wealth, and that the more money a country contained, the more prosperous it would be. Money, however, is, of course, only one form of wealth, although the medium of exchange for all other wealth. If the amount of coin in a country was doubled, and none of it allowed to quit the country, its true wealth, its corn, stock, its mineral produce, and the like, would not be doubled also. A rise of prices would result. Where one shilling had been paid before, two shillings would now have to be paid. Everybody's pocket would be heavier, but nobody would be any the richer. Governments, however, from a belief in the mercantile system, tried to prevent the importation of goods, in order to stop money from going out of the country, and encouraged their exportation, in order to bring money into the country; and the more exports and fewer imports of a people, the more prosperous they were supposed to be. Hence it followed that nations were jealous of one another's trade, and it was thought a happy thing for England, that while she was at peace, the Continent was devastated by war, because she was likely to find fewer rivals to compete with in foreign markets. Heavy duties were laid on articles of importation, in order that the country, instead of buying them of foreigners, might, if possible, produce them at home. Such duties could only be pernicious. They compelled consumers to pay high prices; they did not provide extra employment for Englishmen, because the same amount of labour and capital, given to industries more suited to the climate, the soil, or the character of the people, would have served to buy the protected articles from foreigners, and left a surplus over, to be employed upon further production. trade in hands of During the sixteenth century, merchants trading to foreign parts had generally obtained charters from the crown, incorporating them into companies with special privileges. Thus the Foreign trade with Russia was monopolized by a 'Russian Company,' incorporated in 1554; that with the Low companics. Countries and Germany by the 'Merchant Adventurers,' who were incorporated as early as 1407. One company traded with Norway, Sweden, and Denmark; while the 'Turkey Company' engrossed the trade with the Levant. The fact that the members of these companies were generally Londoners, helps |