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 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN <
 
 THE PEOPLE'S LIBRARY. 
 
 THE BRITISH CITIZEN 
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 
 
 A SHORT HISTORY. 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES E. THOROLD ROGERS, M.P, 
 
 PUBLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE COMMITTEE 
 
 OF GENERAL LITERATURE AND EDUCATION APPOINTED BY THE 
 
 SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, 
 NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, CHARING CROSS, W.C. ; 
 
 43, QUERN VICTORIA STREET, H.C. ; 
 
 26, ST. GEORGE'S PLACE, HYDE PARK CORNER, s.w. 
 BRIGHTON: 135, NORTH STREET. 
 
 NEW YORK : E. & J. B. YOUNG AND CO. 
 
 1885.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. INTRODUCTION ... ... ... ... 5 
 
 II. THE AGRICULTURAL SETTLEMENT ... ... 10 
 
 III. THE RACE KINGDOMS... ... ... ... 17 
 
 IV. THE GROWTH OF THE KING'S POWER ... 23 
 V. ENGLAND AT THE CONQUEST ... ... ... 29 
 
 VI. THE EXCHEQUER/ AND THE SOCIAL STATE IT 
 
 DEALT WITH ... ... ... ... 38 
 
 VII. THE OFFICERS OF THE EXCHEQUER ... 46 
 
 VIII. THE KING'S PEACE AND THE SUBJECTS' DUES ... 52 
 
 IX. THE KING'S COURTS ... ... ... 58 
 
 X. THE ENGLISH TOWNS... ... ... ... 64 
 
 XI. THE SERFS AND THEIR ENFRANCHISEMENT... 69 
 
 XII. THE EVENTS WHICH ASSISTED THE SERF ... 76 
 
 XIII. THE INSURRECTION OF THE SERFS... ... 82 
 
 XIV. THE EARLIEST PARLIAMENTS ... ... ... 87 
 
 XV. THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AND THE ELECTORS 93 
 
 XVI. THE PLACE OF PARLIAMENT IN THE CONSTITU- 
 TION ... ... ... ... ... 99 
 
 XVII. THE KING'S JUSTICE AND JUDGES ... ... 105
 
 4 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PACE 
 
 XVIII. THE CRIMINAL LAW AND THE JUDGES OF IT ... in 
 
 XIX. THE LIBERTY OF THE SUBJECT ... ... 117 
 
 XX. EDUCATION IN EARLY TIMES ... ... ... 122 
 
 XXI. THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES ... ... 128 
 
 XXII. THE WORK OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN REFORMS... 134 
 
 XXIII. THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE ... ... 139 
 
 XXIV. EDUCATIONAL BRIDGES ... ... ... 145 
 
 XXV. THE PRESS ... ... ... ... 151 
 
 XXVI. THE ACTION OF THE CLERGY ... ... ... 157 
 
 XXVII. THE GROWTH OF TOLERATION ... ... 163 
 
 XXVIII. PUBLIC OPINION ... ... ... ... 169 
 
 XXIX. PROGRESS UNDER REPRESSION ... ... 174 
 
 XXX. COLONIAL ENGLAND ... ... ... ... 180 
 
 XXXI. THE RIGHT OF ASSOCIATION FOR PRIVATE AND 
 
 PUBLIC OBJECTS ... 186
 
 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 IT is my purpose in this little work to 
 point out to my readers how it has 
 been that the modern Englishman 
 has, in the course of ages, attained his 
 present place as a citizen, with the rights and 
 privileges which belong to that condition. The 
 story is not a continuous one, for the English- 
 man has occupied at different periods a position 
 of very different strength or security. But his 
 condition has been progressive, for, with very 
 rare exceptions, the reverses of one period have 
 not been disasters. The social progress of the 
 English people has never run the risk, we may 
 almost say incurred the certainty, of that down- 
 fall which visited those homes of ancient civiliza-
 
 6 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 tion, the sites of which are some of the fairest 
 treasures of literature and art, the ruins of which 
 are perpetual objects of interest, of curiosity, of 
 admiration, and above all of warning. We now 
 know that far back in time there was amazing 
 civilization and wealth in Egypt, in the plains 
 of Mesopotamia, in the tableland of the upper 
 Tigris, in Persia, and along the shores of the 
 Black Sea. Asia Minor was full of opulent 
 cities. The southern shores of the Mediter- 
 ranean were populous and wealthy; Tyre and 
 Carthage pushed their commerce through a 
 canal to the Red Sea and, it is said, even round 
 Africa. But all or nearly all those sites of 
 ancient civilization are now desolate, and the 
 waste places of the earth are now to be found 
 where its gardens blossomed and bore fruit 
 aforetime. 
 
 But this reverse which came on ancient civil- 
 ization is not the only noteworthy phenomenon 
 in the history of the human race. England was 
 by no means the first European country which 
 started on the race of progress. Our country 
 had hardly the beginning of a literature when 
 the most perfect compositions in the Italian 
 language were published and copied. It bor- 
 rowed the elements of its manufactures from 
 neighbours who were far more advanced in the 
 arts of life. Other countries had vigorous and 
 apparently stable institutions when England 
 was in the grasp of foreign conquerors, and 
 apparently without any of the realities of national
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 7 
 
 life and hope. There were parliaments older 
 than those of England, rights recognized as the 
 inalienable property of citizens among other 
 communities at a time when the mass of Eng- 
 lishmen were reputed to be without rights. 
 There were prosperous trading cities at a time 
 when English sailors hardly ventured out of 
 sight of the coast. In the darkest times of the 
 English people's life, there were kingdoms in 
 the far east at Bagdad, and in the far west at 
 Grenada, where opulence was general, learning 
 was cultivated, and everything seemed to 
 promise a secure future. 
 
 But the early promise of these nations passed 
 away. The genius and the free institutions of 
 Italy had a very short duration. The manu- 
 factures of Flanders and southern France were 
 well-nigh extirpated. The parliaments of Spain 
 and France were silenced, and the liberties of 
 the people were violently reft from them. The 
 trading cities and markets of the Middle Ages, 
 the wealth of which was the object of admiration 
 or envy to their rude neighbours, have become 
 desolate and deserted, and the flourishing 
 Mohammedan kingdoms of the far east and the 
 far west have long been subject to other lords. 
 But even when these changes took place, 
 England was still backward among the nations. 
 
 The sequel, however, is most remarkable. 
 The institutions of England have been imitated 
 by all civilized nations. The model of her 
 parliaments has been set up in every European
 
 8 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 community and in the New World. Repre- 
 sentatives of the people are elected in other 
 countries on her systems, and debate according 
 to English practice or habit is customary in 
 them. The men who speak the English 
 language, who consider the English literature 
 their heritage, and English history their history, 
 are far more numerous than the inhabitants of 
 these islands. There seems little doubt that, at 
 no remote period, the English speech will be 
 the language of the civilized world, and even be 
 the means through which nations which are not 
 descended from our stock will partake of the 
 advantages which our constitution has secured 
 to us. It is quite worth while to search into, 
 and, if possible, to discover the causes of so 
 singular a state of things. 
 
 I do not state these facts with a view to dis- 
 missing other equally obvious truths. We must 
 not believe that the progress and the extension 
 of our social and political history has landed us 
 in anything near perfection. They who take 
 account of English social life, and they are 
 many, are painfully alive to many shortcomings 
 in the national character, to many grievous 
 deficiencies and ill practices in our public and 
 private life. Nations, like individuals, can claim 
 no immunity from error, are unable to secure 
 themselves invariably against wrongdoing. 
 But if what is said above is accurate and no 
 one can dispute the fact we have had either the 
 good fortune or the prudence to escape some of
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 9 
 
 the casualties and errors which have wrecked 
 the progress of nations whose future at one 
 time seemed to be far more assured than our 
 own. It is assuredly, also, not vainglorious for 
 a people to examine into the causes which have 
 given them so singular a power of instructing 
 other nations in the arts of government and the 
 progress of human liberty. In the first instance, 
 we borrowed the forms of our representative 
 system and municipal self-government from the 
 practices of other countries. But we have 
 maintained, have completed, and, to the present 
 extent of our knowledge and power, have per- 
 fected them ourselves. They are, like our laws, 
 of our own growing, though we may have im- 
 ported the seed, or even the plant. We have 
 exported the product freely and widely. 
 
 In treating this topic it will be necessary for 
 me to touch on the very origin of our social life, 
 the particulars of which do not differ widely 
 from those of other civilized nations, and to 
 discover as best I may, from the political and 
 social history of our people, what have been the 
 special causes which have brought about present 
 results. The principal cause, I think, we shall 
 find to have been that divergent interests have 
 been schooled into aiming at and attaining 
 common benefits.
 
 10 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE AGRICULTURAL SETTLEMENT. 
 
 THE first stage in civilization is the agricultural 
 settlement, with the power and the practice of 
 self-government. All research into the history 
 of nations is conclusive on this point. These 
 settlements can be traced in the beginnings of 
 every race which has made progress. They are 
 found in the remotest times throughout Hindo- 
 stan, and they remain there to this day. They 
 were characteristic of those races in Greece and 
 Italy, in Asia and Africa, which grew into the 
 opulent and famous cities in which so much in 
 the early history of civilization was developed. 
 It is most probable that these settlements were 
 made among races which were incapable of 
 this elementary association, and who therefore 
 gradually perished, or were taught the practices 
 of their invaders and were slowly assimilated 
 with them. The early narrative, frequently of 
 no historical exactness, but unquestionably true 
 in outline, of all the great races which have in- 
 fluenced the world, affirms that the race was 
 immigrant. The Greeks said that they came 
 from Asia, the Romans claimed a similar origin. 
 The Israelites settled on land which they 
 wrested, in part at least, from an earlier popu- 
 lation, or appropriated because it had not been
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. I I 
 
 settled or cultivated. The English people have 
 made conquests as other European nations 
 have, but they are the only people in modern 
 Europe who have colonized as these ancient 
 peoples did. Such colonies, and such colonies 
 only, grow into nations. The English colonies 
 in North America, including the United States, 
 in Australasia, and partially elsewhere, are cases 
 in point. These parts of the world have been 
 occupied in modern times, the difference of ages 
 being considered, as England, and indeed Scot- 
 land on the south and east, were occupied after 
 the fall of the Roman empire. 
 
 The Romans had occupied England as the 
 English have occupied India. They had garri- 
 sons in it, cities in it, villas in it. They raised 
 armies from its inhabitants, as the Indian govern- 
 ment does from the native races. But they 
 never, as in what is modern France, and was 
 anciently called Gaul, became one with the 
 people. Had they clone so, the basis of the 
 English language, like that of the French lan- 
 guage, would have been Latin. As it was, in 
 all likelihood, the mass of the older inhabitants 
 of Great Britain, during the four centuries in 
 which the Romans were here, were entirely un- 
 affected by the presence of their masters. They 
 were kept from marauding by the presence of 
 the army and the government, and, when army 
 and government were gone, there was nothing 
 to resist a foreign invader, except perhaps the 
 inhabitants of a few towns, who were able
 
 12 THE BRITISH CITIZEN '. 
 
 throughout to hold their own. Such towns 
 were London, Winchester, York, and Exeter. 
 The continued existence of such places had a 
 potent influence in the future of England. 
 
 Long before Rome quitted Britain she had to 
 ward off as best she could those settlers from 
 the north who strove to land in this country. 
 When she was gone, the only hindrances to the 
 settlement were the Romanized inhabitants of 
 the towns. Many of these held their own, and 
 were not dispossessed. Some were destroyed ; 
 never, I imagine, unless they resisted the in- 
 vaders, who wished to settle not in towns, but 
 on agricultural land. The new-comers had less 
 civilization than the old rulers, but much more 
 than the mass of the native inhabitants, who in 
 all likelihood had only partially learned to prac- 
 tise agriculture at all, and were probably the 
 savage tribes who, when Roman domination 
 was at an end, rose up against their Romanized 
 fellow-countrymen. The rising of the subdued 
 Britons is, I have no doubt, the true story of 
 Hengist, of Horsa, of Rowena and Vortigern, 
 of the Picts and the Saxons. 
 
 However it was that they made good their 
 footing, it is certain that the invaders did so, and 
 established themselves in their several settle- 
 ments between the fifth and seventh centuries. 
 These settlements have Survived to our own 
 time in the form of parishes. I do not mean 
 to say that the parishes of to-day are the same 
 in number and the same in extent as they were
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES, 13 
 
 from twelve to fourteen centuries ago, between 
 which periods most of England was planted and 
 named. But thousands of our modern parishes 
 represent the settlements of that new race which 
 was called by many names some names of 
 origin or race, some of relative geographical 
 position. At last, as seems from accident, the 
 settlers gave this country the name of England, 
 after one of the tribes which contributed to the 
 settlement. 
 
 The settlers created the parish. This social 
 unity or corporation has been known by many 
 names at various periods of its history. The 
 two names which have survived the longest are 
 manor and parish. But these words are long 
 subsequent to the formation of that which they 
 designate, and refer to changes which came over 
 them in the course of centuries, for the one is 
 indicative of the Norman conquest, the other of 
 an ecclesiastical organization. The new-comers 
 had a religion, in which the powers of nature 
 appear to have been worshipped, but under 
 forms which lent themselves without much 
 violence to the Christianity which was after- 
 wards embraced. They seem to have recog- 
 nized a good and evil principle, a Divine Being 
 whose life was sacrificed by violence, the im- 
 mortality of the soul, and a personal existence 
 after death. 
 
 Even if we had no direct evidence on the 
 subject we might be certain that these settle- 
 ments were of the same character as those which
 
 14 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 were described, perhaps with some amplifica- 
 tions, centuries before, and as those which are 
 still to be discovered now. The essence of the 
 system was seclusion or separation from any 
 other settlement, and self-government. It was 
 entirely self-contained. All the inhabitants were 
 reputed to be descended from a common an- 
 cestor, and they did not admit strangers among 
 them. Every one had land. The whole com- 
 munity had common pasture and common wood, 
 the former for feeding their cattle, the latter for 
 fuel and building their houses. They built their 
 huts pretty close together, generally on the sides 
 of those ancient roads which the Romans had 
 made. The wood was the first boundary of the 
 settlement. Beyond it was a waste, a no-man's 
 land. The boundaries of the settlement were 
 guarded with jealousy, and it was a high crime 
 to disturb them. There is no doubt that in 
 many country places villagers' cottages occupy 
 the same site which they occupied when the first 
 settlers dwelt on them, just as there are places 
 where nearly the same speech is spoken as 
 was uttered there so long ago. 
 
 Every government, even of the smallest com- 
 munity, must undertake two duties. It must 
 regulate the rights of property, and it must 
 protect persons from fraud and violence. It 
 probably invests some person with the authority 
 which is necessary for carrying out the decisions 
 of the community, whether they be on civil or 
 criminal cases ; i.e. it constitutes a head man of
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 15 
 
 the village. But the action of such a person is 
 limited to presiding over the assembly of the 
 settlement, and to executing, either in person or 
 by command, the decree which he is bidden to 
 pronounce. 
 
 It is almost certain that from the beginning 
 individuals possessed private property in land. 
 Had it been always held in common, it is diffi- 
 cult to see how private ownership could have 
 been developed. The Irish villages held arable 
 land in common, and it required the energetic 
 action of a foreign power to extinguish the 
 custom, and even under these circumstances it 
 was extinguished very slowly. But though land 
 was so much distributed, the risks of life were 
 so serious that it is probable that population 
 progressed very slowly, and that the number of 
 families suffered scarcely any change. 
 
 The property which each person possessed in 
 the ploughed field of the parish was that of a 
 certain number of strips, bounded by a narrow 
 ridge of unploughed ground from that of his 
 neighbour. To this ownership the son, on the 
 death of his father, was admitted in view of the 
 whole villagers, and by some symbol, as a clod 
 or a twig being delivered to him. In this manner 
 there was public evidence of his property. There 
 are ancient legal customs in England, from which 
 it appears that if a man married a woman from 
 another settlement, her relations could acquire 
 no rights in the place of her adoption. 
 
 There were of course offences and offenders
 
 1 6 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 in these settlements. When wrongs were com- 
 mitted, the offender was brought before the head 
 man and his offence was certified, before the 
 head man could take any action. If it was 
 proved that he had committed the deed, he was 
 fined, all crimes being punished by this process, 
 even homicide. We possess the codes of many 
 Teutonic races, and from an early date. In all 
 these the principal part of the code is the assess- 
 ment of fines, which differ, first according to 
 the extent of the injury, next according to the 
 dignity of the injured person. The fine went to 
 the injured person. If the offender could not or 
 would not pay, he became the slave of the person 
 he had wronged, and, in case he had slain a man, 
 of his representative. In all likelihood, too, the 
 debtor who could not meet his obligations was 
 made the slave of his creditor. In this way 
 many persons were reduced to the condition of 
 servitude from early times. Some became the 
 absolute bondsmen of their creditors, some suf- 
 fered a partial bondage, i.e. had to work for a 
 specified time. 
 
 The vestry of a parish, it has been observed, 
 is the most ancient of English institutions. It 
 represents the old gatherings of the primaeval 
 settlement. The parson of the parish presides 
 as the head man of the village did of yore. The 
 parson is admitted to his office by symbols which 
 represent the ancient method by which every 
 freeholder was recognized, for he is handed the 
 key of the church, and takes bodily possession
 
 MIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. I? 
 
 of the edifice. It is true that other arrange- 
 ments have been made for the admission of lay 
 persons to their tenements, and for the chastise- 
 ment of offenders ; but the old customs remained 
 very long, and, when writing became general, 
 they were transcribed in thousands of documents 
 which still survive. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE RACE KINGDOMS, 
 
 THE settlement, then, is complete in itself id 
 exactly like the state in little. No stranger 
 has rights within it, and it has no rights over its 
 neighbours. The jealousy of neighbouring 
 villages is still discernible in many places. At 
 the same time, there must have been some 
 intercourse for primitive trade or barter. Such 
 intercourse was held at stated times, outside the 
 boundary of the village and on neutral ground. 
 This was the origin of the fair. When in the 
 course of time cities were frequented, the same 
 rule of fixed days prevailed. But as the city or 
 town preserved a special form of self-government 
 or in time procured it, the trading was done 
 within the town. This was the origin of the 
 market. 
 
 This isolated organization could not last with- 
 out the establishment of another organization. 
 It is most likely that from the very beginning
 
 1 8 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 these villages were enrolled under some one 
 chieftain or superior. All the settlements of 
 which we read occupied the country under a 
 leader. The invaders won a battle over the 
 natives, made their settlements, and then pushed 
 on. There were common interests and common 
 duties. Even when the country seemed con- 
 quered, the settlers were liable to sudden incur- 
 sions from their old foes. The leader, too, had 
 to be maintained, to have his portion assigned 
 to him and his family, in larger measure than 
 the other invaders had. There was plenty of 
 room for him and his. It seems that nearly all 
 our present shires were originally little kingdoms, 
 for we find names of kings whose dominions and 
 even whose existence are not recorded in written 
 history. 
 
 Very speedily these kings gathered round 
 themselves followers whom they kept near them 
 and rewarded with grants of land. The power 
 of the king kept constantly growing, especially 
 in comparison with that of the little agricultural 
 settlements, who could be employed for a com- 
 mon purpose only under some leader. He 
 therefore claimed the attendance of the male 
 population in war for the defence of the whole 
 race, and in order to make his summons effective 
 divided his dominions into certain parcels. He 
 did not meddle with the jurisdiction of the 
 settlement, but those who were under his 
 authority were made liable, at least for certain 
 purposes, to another law, that of the king, and
 
 fits- RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 19 
 
 to other magistrates than those of their own 
 little local court. The king, too, had a far wider 
 authority over his own immediate followers, who 
 began to take higher rank than the village 
 settlers did, though they were only called the 
 king's servants. 
 
 After a time the different kingdoms began to 
 make war on each other. They had driven the 
 natives away, or thoroughly vanquished them, 
 and they now sought to aggrandize themselves 
 on the people of their own race. When history 
 begins to be written about them only a few of 
 these petty kingdoms survive, and at last one 
 achieves a nominal and uncertain supremacy 
 over the rest. By this time the king is attended 
 by a body of nobles, still under the old names, 
 who have become opulent and powerful. 
 
 Now, however, there is a new danger at hand 
 (about 780). The invaders are invaded in their 
 turn, and the kingdom which seemed to be 
 founded on the conquest of the whole country, 
 is made to suffer the direst reverses. The east 
 side of England, always in early times the most 
 populous and fertile, is occupied by the new- 
 comers. These, however, in time, though not 
 without fierce and cruel struggles, settle down 
 peacefully by the side of their old foes. There 
 never was a country so often conquered within 
 a few centuries as England was during the first 
 six hundred years of the so-called Saxon period. 
 After the last of these conquests its continuous 
 public history begins, and with this its progress.
 
 20 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 Less than two centuries after the first settle- 
 ment (602), Christianity was preached in Eng- 
 land, and made slow and very fitful progress, 
 for much of England remained fiercely pagan 
 long after the first missionaries came. They 
 brought with them from Italy the system of 
 government by bishops, which, though general 
 in the Christian world, does not seem to have been 
 universal, and appears to have been far from being 
 developed in these islands, for though an Eng- 
 lish bishop is named before the Saxon conquest, 
 we do not hear that a see was assigned to him. 
 The bishop rapidly became the second person 
 in the state ; and probably when the oldest sees 
 were founded, there were as many kings as there 
 were bishops. The see was generally fixed in 
 some obscure or small hamlet, where there was 
 convenience for the bishop and his missionary 
 monks. Some of them, however, were placed 
 in the old Roman towns ; as, for example, at 
 London, Winchester, and Canterbury. 
 
 Now, it was inevitable that, in the midst of 
 such incessant war and such perpetual disasters, 
 many persons should be reduced from a free 
 condition to one of servitude. In the early 
 history of all nations, the vanquished warrior, if 
 his life is spared, becomes the slave of the victor. 
 The losses of a surprise in one of the settlements 
 would disable a debtor from paying his debts. 
 He became a slave. Or he committed some 
 offence, and could not pay the heavy penalty 
 laid on him ; for as the power of the king and
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 21 
 
 his authority grew, the fines for misconduct were 
 multiplied and enlarged. The king's nobles or 
 servants received large grants of land from their 
 master, and wanted slaves to inhabit and culti- 
 vate them. The slave must live, so he was 
 provided with land, sufficient, after he had 
 worked for his lord, to maintain himself and his 
 family. Unless the lord emancipated him, he 
 could not by any effort of his own rise above 
 his calling, or raise his children above it. Hence 
 the class of serfs was always increasing at the 
 expense or loss of the free inhabitants. It is 
 possible that there were personal slaves, i.e. 
 slaves who were not settled on land and engaged 
 in agriculture, but who constituted the household 
 of their lord. But it is not very likely. Among 
 all the Teutonic nations domestic service was 
 honourable. The proudest nobles did not dis- 
 dain to do what we should call menial service 
 to the king. We see it in the king's chamber- 
 lain, i.e. his personal attendant ; his marshal, 
 which really means his chief groom of the stables, 
 his butler, his steward, and the controller of his 
 household ; and what the kings did with their 
 closest personal associates, the noble did with 
 his. 
 
 There was, however, still another change to 
 come. We have left the freeholders greatly 
 diminished in numbers and weakened, but still 
 tenaciously holding to their settlement and its 
 usages. The lord in the neighbourhood enters 
 into a bargain with them. The king is his over-
 
 22 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 lord, he will be their overlord under the king, 
 to whom they already owe substantial duties. 
 In return for the place he gets, he will defend 
 them. They must turn their border woodland 
 into his forest, where they will have rights of 
 fuel and timber, but he has the soil. He will 
 secure them their local jurisdiction. All great 
 injuries shall be fined as before, and go to the 
 injured party ; all fines for smaller breaches of 
 the peace, and the proceeds of other police 
 matters, shall go to him, and be assessed by his 
 representatives. He will not preside over the 
 court himself, and his steward shall not be able 
 to punish a single offender, unless the inhabitants 
 inform against him. In this way he cannot 
 oppress them, for if his steward is rapacious, he 
 will get no fines, and the steward will not, on 
 the other hand, lend himself to party spite. So 
 far, he is offering them a real service and pre- 
 serving their liberties. He is, however, going 
 to do more to defend them everywhere and 
 against all. If they choose to fight with him, 
 he will take the service for a limited time, and 
 will only call on them to help and aid him as he 
 aids the king. If they do not wish to fight, 
 except at the king's summons, to which they 
 are already liable, and which they dare not dis- 
 obey, he will protect them, and most likely get 
 them off the risk. Let them pay him a rent for 
 their -holding, and he will secure them from all 
 but the king's claims. 
 
 I don't think an Anglo-Saxon farmer, when
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 23 
 
 the Danes were about, could refuse this bargain. 
 To be sure, he had to hold from a man what 
 before he had held from God and by his own 
 right hand only. But the thane was rich and 
 strong, and he was weak. He fell into the bar- 
 gain, perhaps he was forced to accept it ; and 
 thus began what is called the feudal system. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE GROWTH OF THE KING'S TOWER. 
 
 THE freeholder in the old sense of the word, 
 that is, the freeman who had a holding in the 
 soil, and who owed nothing to any man, unless 
 it were the obligation to drive out an invading 
 enemy in concert with his fellows, had entered 
 into a new obligation at last, to an overlord. In 
 other countries, where the original population 
 had not been extirpated or driven away, it is 
 more than probable that this relation of lord 
 and vassal had been developed in very early 
 times. In England it was a supremacy of 
 Englishmen over Englishmen, and must have 
 seemed at first harsh and unnatural. But, as 
 I have said, the right of village self-government 
 in the tenure of property and the protection of 
 persons was secured to the inhabitants, and 
 therefore the change of the new system may not 
 have been very irritating. 
 
 Loyalty as yet was, as far as these people
 
 24 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 went, confined to the respect which such per- 
 sons had to their local customs and their 
 local authorities. In one particular, the village 
 was merciless. It considered that treason to 
 the settlement was the most unpardonable of 
 offences. The collections of the old German 
 customs, from which our own are undoubtedly 
 derived, show that the most frightful punish- 
 ments were inflicted on those who , committed 
 treason against the collective settlement. These 
 punishments were ultimately incorporated into 
 the horrible law of treason, which prevailed in 
 England for four centuries or more. 
 
 Whether the allegiance to the king preceded 
 that to the overlord or followed it cannot be 
 made out. As the king's servants were to him, 
 so were the lord's dependants to the lord. The 
 dependence of the inferior husbandman on his 
 superior was undoubtedly borrowed in form 
 from the dependence of the king's servants on 
 their own master. But that the king should 
 claim the allegiance of his whole people was 
 natural. It was, first, a condition of the public 
 defence. There were in those days no standing 
 armies. The national force was of the king's 
 dependants and the rural militia. Next, the 
 authority of the king grew naturally. He was 
 from the beginning the principal person in the 
 nation or race or tribe. His office was limited 
 to the members of one family, from which the 
 most suitable was chosen. It was inevitable 
 that his authority should increase. Next, he
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 25 
 
 was the accepted leader in war, and war was the 
 customary condition of the times war against 
 neighbouring kingdoms, war against foreign 
 invaders. It was impossible for such a people 
 to have lasting peace. They must all be ready 
 for war, and for a war under a natural and tried 
 leader. Every parish had, no doubt, its strong 
 place, its stockade, to which the people could fly 
 and carry their goods and cattle from marauders ; 
 but the battle was fought in the open country. 
 
 The king therefore claimed the allegiance of 
 all his subjects. As far as we can find, this was 
 claimed formally only a generation or two before 
 the Norman conquest. For a long time, the 
 only legal protection of the king was the large 
 fine which was exacted from any offender who 
 did him a personal injury or took his life. But 
 even this was an extension of the custom of the 
 village to a custom in the kingdom. 
 
 There can be no doubt that the authority of 
 the prince was greatly aided by the conversion 
 of the English to Christianity. The bishop of 
 the Saxon England was almost always a states- 
 man as well as an ecclesiastic. He was the 
 principal person at the royal court. But he was 
 also the centre of ecclesiastical government, and 
 a government which was very .central. From 
 tradition, or policy, or convenience, the bishop 
 was the chief of a body of monks. The esta- 
 blishment of the parochial clergy was later in 
 England than that of the monasteries, and the 
 monks roaming about the country were the
 
 26 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 agents by which the pagan English were brought 
 over to Christianity. But an institution which 
 had so exceedingly centralized a system, was an 
 obvious and a convenient means for enforcing 
 deference to the central secular ruler. The king 
 had every reason for employing the services and 
 for listening to the counsels of the bishop. 
 
 Still, the whole country, even at the best of 
 times, had but a very slight cohesion. It was 
 constantly exposed to invasion. At intervals 
 for a century and a half, it struggled with the 
 Danes, who at last succeeded in planting a 
 dynasty of their own kings on the throne. The 
 succession was changed again, and a new order 
 of things with an entirely new departure began 
 with the Conquest. The progress, continuous 
 but unequal, of the later Englishman commences 
 with this epoch. 
 
 I have, however, prepared this sketch of the 
 social condition of England in these remote 
 times, because so much of the old life remains 
 at the present time. The church of the parish 
 occupied at once the place where the elders of 
 the village met, where the old religion was 
 practised, and where the stronghold of the 
 village was surrounded by a stockade. The 
 tower of the church was often, very often, the 
 castle of the villagers, and the body of the church 
 was the outwork of that last defence. Here 
 they stored in times of danger their most 
 precious possessions. One of the most charac- 
 teristic cities of the later Saxon epoch is Oxford.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 27 
 
 It grew up under one or two Saxon monasteries, 
 which were planted on a site which was naturally 
 a stronghold. The daughter of the great Alfred 
 raised a mound here of considerable height, 
 which, as the manner of their fortification was, 
 she certainly crowned with a strong stockade. 
 This was at the most defensible part of the area 
 enclosed in the town. At the north and the 
 south stood two churches, each dedicated to the 
 archangel Michael. These were watch towers, 
 erected before the walls, from which the inhabi- 
 tants might espy the approaching enemy in 
 which, as in other defended places, they might 
 take refuge and attack the invaders. 
 
 Englishmen, though they have happily at- 
 tained, under what would seem to have been 
 great obstacles, that genuine love of country 
 which makes them act with a common purpose, 
 and yet with that local feeling which makes 
 them cherish local associations, cling greatly to 
 the past. I believe that the great majority of 
 us are convinced that the county of our birth is 
 the best part of England, and if we were born 
 countryfolk, that our parish or village of the 
 county is the most favoured spot in it. The, 
 sentiment is not growing weaker. The English 
 people has had to struggle against the attempts 
 of government (very natural attempts, for the 
 administration of all human affairs aims at doincf 
 
 "> 
 
 its work in the most methodical and easy way) 
 to constrain local feeling into acquiescence with 
 central government, and after a struggle for
 
 28 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 ages has effected a compromise. It is beginning 
 to understand what that government should do, 
 and it is gradually striving, and will in the end 
 succeed in formulating, what a central govern- 
 ment should not do, but should leave to local 
 institutions. 
 
 There is hardly an effort made after social 
 reform, which does not, perhaps unconsciously, 
 seek to revive the institutions of our remote 
 forefathers. There is an active party which 
 seeks to give the inhabitants of every parish a 
 direct and immediate control over all houses of 
 entertainment. It is merely striving to revive 
 what was done for centuries by the senate of the 
 mediaeval village. There are a good many 
 persons who think that the local magistrate 
 should be elected by the suffrages of his fellows. 
 To do so would be to revive early usage. If 
 the elders of the village presented to such a 
 local authority such offenders as have created 
 scandal and inflicted minor injuries on their 
 neighbours, they would revive the old jury of 
 the court leet, and perhaps be more effectual in 
 maintaining a just order than the local policeman 
 and the justice's parlour can. For the essence 
 of the ancient village was self-government, and 
 now that national unity is an inveterate senti- 
 ment in Englishmen's minds, the completion of 
 the system is the restoration of local self-govern- 
 ment. I can conceive nothing which would aid 
 habits of thrift and order more than that experi- 
 ence which our forefathers had, and the wisest
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 29 
 
 of philosophers enunciated, that the best social 
 education of men is that under which they learn 
 how to be ruled wisely, and how to rule wisely. 
 In his youth, the villager was under the authority 
 of his elders, not indeed of his father only, but 
 of the senators of the settlement ; in his age, he 
 became one of the local parliament himself. He 
 might, as time went on, even though he bore by 
 birth the ineffaceable mark of serfdom, be the 
 head man of the village, the trusted depositary 
 of the lord's confidence, of his business and his 
 favours. The process by which he was turned 
 from a villager, whose whole experiences and 
 hopes were centred in the place of his birth, 
 whose conceptions of the world outside him 
 were shadowy and undefined, and who could 
 not be expected to realize any rights or duties 
 which lay outside his little world, into an Eng- 
 lish citizen with a love of country has to be 
 described. It was a very slow process ; it can 
 scarcely be said to be completed yet, for it takes 
 some time after public rights are recognized, 
 before these rights are interpreted under the 
 rule of public duties. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 ENGLAND AT THE CONQUEST. 
 
 AT the time of the Conquest (1066) there were 
 three strong forces in England, whose interests 
 might be harmonized, but which were constantly
 
 3O THE BRITISH CITIZEN '. 
 
 at variance, as they remained from time to time 
 at variance for centuries. These were the king, 
 who represented the central authority ; the 
 Church, which guided the religious and in some 
 degree the social progress of the people, and 
 had now begun to be divided into the regular 
 clergy, by which is meant the monks ; and the 
 secular^ by which is meant the parochial, clergy. 
 The monasteries affected to be independent of 
 the bishop's authority, and to be under the direct 
 control of the Roman Church, though, for reasons 
 which I shall give further on, this control was 
 not very effective. 
 
 The English Church was the result of a 
 missionary effort from Rome itself. The con- 
 version spread rapidly in the south and the 
 east, but was for a long time resisted in the 
 great midland kingdom of Mercia. At last this 
 part of England yielded, and the zeal of the 
 Saxon missionaries from England was as great 
 and more courageous than that of Augustine 
 and his companions, for it was an Englishman 
 (Wilfrid, known afterwards as St. Boniface) who 
 was the apostle of Germany. For a time the 
 bishops were Italians. Once a Greek of Tarsus 
 sat at Canterbury. But very soon the bishops 
 were English, and the Church became entirely 
 national. In truth, for some time before the 
 Norman conquest, the Roman Church was in 
 extreme weakness and discredit, till at last, 
 almost at the crisis of the Conquest, a great 
 internal reform in its discipline and conduct was 
 effected.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 3 I 
 
 The nobles had been, it seems, originally the 
 descendants of those royal houses which had 
 finally been constrained to submit to the single 
 king of England. In course of time there were 
 aldermen in nearly every county. Besides these 
 there were the king's thanes or servants, who 
 now had become the overlords of the peasantry, 
 and into whose ranks men with a certain amount 
 of fortune would be ranged. The principal 
 officers of the king were the alderman, the 
 bishop, and the sheriff the first concerned with 
 the civil government of the country, the second 
 with its religion as well as with a great amount 
 of secular business, the third with the king's 
 revenue, which was derived from the numerous 
 estates belonging to the king, his dues as over- 
 lord, and his claims to extraordinary aid. This 
 it was the sheriffs business to collect. In the 
 latest epoch of the Saxon kingdom the principal 
 part of the administration was in the hands of a 
 few great earls, who seem to have been ap- 
 pointed by the king and to be responsible to 
 him. The name " earl " was derived from the 
 Danes. 
 
 William the Norman claimed to be the heir 
 of the Saxon monarchs, and to succeed to the 
 amplest rights which they had enjoyed. He 
 was at once, therefore, by the act of conquest, 
 the heir to all the royal estates, and also the heir 
 by forfeiture to all which had been possessed by 
 Harold and his brothers. The battle in which 
 he won the crown had further enriched him by
 
 32 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 the forfeiture of many of those who had taken 
 Harold's side ; and as he had to provide for his 
 followers as well as to strengthen himself, his 
 first victory was followed by extensive forfeitures. 
 The dispossessed English nobles rebelled, and 
 were subdued. At last, and towards the con- 
 clusion of his reign, when Domesday was com- 
 piled, almost all the old Saxon thanes were dis- 
 possessed, and Normans were put in their room. 
 Beyond securing his own authority and re- 
 warding his successors, William had no wish to 
 change the constitution of the country, least of 
 all to interfere with the local customs and self- 
 government of the villages. The inhabitants of 
 these places exchanged a Saxon overlord for 
 a Norman overlord, and very likely did not 
 find the latter more oppressive than the former 
 had been. Even during the disorders of 
 Stephen's reign (1135-1154), though the new 
 system of building stone castles gave at once 
 the means of licence and the means of refuge 
 to the oppressor, there is no reason to believe 
 that the peasant suffered more than he did 
 during the wars of the rival Saxon kingdoms 
 and the incursions of the Danes. When we 
 come across contemporary evidence of his con- 
 dition, we find him in possession of local self- 
 government, as we know he must have been 
 in possession of it during the ages of the first 
 English settlement. It could not have been 
 destroyed and revived ; it must have been con- 
 tinuous and unbroken.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 33 
 
 The Roman Church had reformed itself, and 
 the Papacy, which had been a generation or two 
 before an object of contempt, was now occupying 
 a most conspicuous and powerful position in 
 Western Europe. The new king determined 
 on reforming and recasting the English Church. 
 He knew that with their great political influence, 
 English bishops and English abbots might, and 
 probably would, harbour and encourage disaffec- 
 tion towards the new dynasty. So on various 
 pretexts they were dispossessed, as the English 
 nobles were, and their places were filled with 
 Normans. But William would not allow his 
 bishops to be dependent on the Pope, or to be 
 his creatures. They were to be his men first, 
 and the Pope's men after him. Very speedily 
 they showed themselves to be on the side of 
 public liberty, at least against misgovernment. 
 -In time the best of them gave their influence 
 on behalf of the English people as against the 
 Norman ruler. But for nearly a century after 
 the Conquest, the chiefs of the English Church 
 were foreigners. The first person of English 
 descent who was raised to dignity in the Church, 
 is said to have been Becket. 
 
 But, as may well be imagined, the Saxon 
 nobles did not submit quietly to dispossession. 
 They became outlaws, they revolted, they made 
 war on the new king. They were put down, 
 dispersed, hunted. They took to the desperate 
 remedy of assassinating the Normans, and left 
 no trace of their identity. The king upon this
 
 34 THE BRITISH CITIZEN i 
 
 sent his own judges whenever a murdered Nor- 
 man was found, and called upon the hundred to 
 produce the culprit. If they failed to do this, 
 they were fined in what was a large sum for the 
 time. The outlaws then strove to destroy the 
 evidence of their victim's origin. The king met 
 this by enacting that any murdered person was 
 to be taken to be a Norman, and that the proof 
 of who the murderers were must be supplied, 
 unless it could be shown it was an Englishman. 
 
 Now, these offences we may be certain were 
 not committed in the villages, but outside their 
 boundaries, in the forest, in the unoccupied dis- 
 tricts. If the villagers had done such a deed, 
 they would have concealed the evidence of it, if 
 they were strong enough, and would have been 
 punished in their local courts if they were not. 
 Besides, it was a fundamental law of the settle- 
 ment that no stranger should be harboured 
 there. If a villager had a guest, he must give 
 notice to the authorities. If he harboured one, 
 he must be responsible for his conduct. If a 
 stranger was a guest beyond a given time, 
 generally three days, the host was not only liable 
 for his acts, but was fined. The enactment of 
 William, then, though intended for the protec- 
 tion of his followers and his officials, put on 
 villages collectively the obligation of keeping 
 the peace and maintaining order beyond the 
 boundaries of their own settlements. 
 
 The inquiry was made by a jury, who were 
 wit 'nesses to the fact. It was the essence of early
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 3$ 
 
 English society that every man should know 
 about the conduct of his neighbour, and should 
 be cognizant of his actions. Such a discipline 
 could be of no injury to an honest man, and 
 must be of great strength to society, because it 
 nips misdoings in the bud. There still remain 
 quaint relics in country villages of the old 
 custom and duty, where personal misconduct is 
 visited with rough music and rough justice. 
 
 The jury system is older than Alfred, and 
 younger than Alfred. It is older, because the 
 villager from the first sat in judgment on 
 offenders, who were always liable to be tried by 
 their peers, as they were liable before the Eng- 
 lish people emigrated from the forests of Ger- 
 many. It is younger, because the obligation 
 of juries being witnesses of the fact, when the 
 offence was committed beyond the boundaries 
 of the settlement, dates from a time after the 
 Norman conquest. It was still later, for it was 
 not till the reign of Charles II., that a jury was 
 declared to be irresponsible for the verdict which 
 it gave, and was not rendered liable to punish- 
 ment for refusing to accept the judge's law, or 
 the crown's desires ; for there were very often 
 strong reasons which led the crown to press for 
 a conviction by fair means or foul, and for judges 
 to do all in their power, for even more sub- 
 stantial reasons, in order to further these desires. 
 
 The indirect consequences of William's action 
 were far more important. It put the duty of 
 inquiring into the gravest offences, those of
 
 36 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 murder, on the central authority, and gradually 
 took it from the local court. It is true that, if 
 an offender was taken in the act, he could be 
 punished by the local authorities. The last case 
 which I have found in which capital punishment 
 is inflicted in a parish court, is in 1337, nearly 
 three centuries after the Conquest. In this case 
 the culprit had stolen an outer garment in a 
 public-house, had run away with it, had been 
 followed by hue and cry, had been captured, and 
 was taken with the article in his possession. 
 He was forthwith tried by a jury, found to be a 
 vagabond, to have no property, and was adjudged 
 to be hanged, the sentence being forthwith exe- 
 cuted. The case, it will be seen, shows how 
 harshly the local jury would treat a stranger 
 who committed an offence, and that it was well, 
 at least, to take so great a power out of hands 
 which might use it with such excessive severity. 
 An inhabitant of the village would have been 
 visited with a moderate fine only, perhaps treated 
 as a practical joker. 
 
 Now, however, in this one crime the duty of 
 investigating into and punishing the offence was 
 put on the king's judges, who might be supposed 
 to be interested in nothing more than keeping 
 the peace and punishing offenders. In course 
 of time the jurisdiction extended to all capital 
 offences, and to some which were not capital, 
 and the authority of the local court fell to some- 
 thing less than that exercised by magistrates 
 and at petty sessions.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 37 
 
 In other countries, however, the higher juris- 
 diction remained in local courts and under the 
 control of local authorities, which became almost 
 absolute till late times, and the power was 
 atrociously abused. In Scotland they who 
 possessed heritable jurisdiction had the right of 
 inflicting capital punishment within their own 
 domain till 1746. In France it lasted till 1789, 
 and the abuses of the system led in no small 
 degree to the frightful excesses which occurred 
 after the leaders of the Revolution became at 
 once frightened and bloodthirsty. We were 
 saved from these consequences at a very early 
 date ; and in theory, at least, the constitution 
 taught men that there was one law for rich and 
 poor alike, when an offence had been committed. 
 
 It is curious that while the writers of this 
 time speak of the hard usage with which the 
 Conqueror, his followers and successors, treated 
 the English, they also comment on the justice 
 which they caused to be administered, and on 
 the security which they brought about. Now, 
 these writers did not publish their books. They 
 composed them for the study of their successors 
 in the monasteries, and with a view to creating 
 an unbroken and continuous succession of 
 chronicles. The complaints refer to the old 
 Saxon aristocracy. The praise refers to the 
 relations of the government towards the people.
 
 38 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE EXCHEQUER, AND THE SOCIAL STATE IT 
 DEALT WITH. 
 
 THE Norman king,' however, devised another 
 engine of government, which has had most im- 
 portant and enduring effects on the social life of 
 England. It consisted in what is known as the 
 Exchequer, the system of which was said to 
 have been invented or imported by William, to 
 have been continued by his son, and to have 
 been revived by his great grandson. It speedily 
 became the centre of the administration. Its 
 primary object was to assure the king's revenue. 
 But it had incidentally great and lasting effects, 
 for out of it were developed the English Consti- 
 tution, Parliamentary Government, and in the 
 end private and public liberty. 
 
 The beginning and the purpose of the Ex- 
 chequer was that of the establishment, on a per- 
 manent and exact footing, of an audit, under 
 every condition of precision and publicity, in 
 which the rights and dues of the king should 
 be registered, received, receipted, and vouched. 
 The beginning of the system was Domesday 
 Book, which was for the greater part of England 
 a minute survey and register of the rights of 
 king and subject. We do not know when this 
 system of annual account keeping began. We
 
 HI$ RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 39 
 
 know that it was in full operation forty years 
 after the Conquest, that it was suspended during 
 the troubles of the fourth Norman King- Scephen, 
 and restored by his successor. At any rate, the 
 earliest accounts are lost, but from the earliest 
 years of Henry II. (i 154) down to the reign of 
 William IV., they exist. No other country has 
 anything like them. 
 
 It is from the indirect effects of this system 
 that the great results alluded to above have 
 sprung. To understand this, let us see what 
 was the state of society with which the Exchequer 
 had to deal. 
 
 Speaking generally, the king was the largest 
 landowner in the whole kingdom. He inherited 
 by the Conquest the ancient estates of the 
 Anglo-Saxon kings, and the forfeitures of his 
 rival and his rival's family. For many a genera- 
 tion these lands were specially characterized, 
 and the inhabitants in them had many privi- 
 leges, as dwellers on the conqueror's domain, or 
 on the king's ancient domain. Then there were 
 the estates of his followers, sometimes very 
 large, but always very scattered, for though 
 William rewarded his inherents generously, he 
 was always on his guard against them, and with 
 good reason, and while he wished from motives 
 of policy to make them powerful against the dis- 
 affected English, he wished also to make them 
 as powerless as possible against himself. He 
 had really more trouble with them than he had 
 with the English, for by the middle of his great
 
 4O THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 grandson's reign, nearly all the great nobles of 
 the Conquest had been rooted out. His plan 
 was to scatter their estates as much as possible, 
 so as to prevent them from having a coherent 
 body of followers. 
 
 These nobles in their turn granted estates to 
 their dependants a parish as it was called in 
 Church matters, a manor as it was known in 
 the secular business of life. In these manors, 
 the lord, who probably, indeed generally, held 
 of some other superior lord, granted in the same 
 way land to his dependants, and so every one 
 but the king held of some superior. No one, 
 except the king, held landed property absolutely. 
 
 The people who held of the king owed him 
 dues. These were fixed, i.e. payable yearly ; 
 or casual, i.e. payable when some event hap- 
 pened in the king's family, or in the family of 
 the tenant. Similarly the under tenant of a 
 lord owed him dues, and in the same manner. 
 His tenants were in the same relation to their 
 superior. It is surprising, when one reads old 
 accounts, to see how large a number of rights 
 might be created in every parish or manor. 
 
 The special peculiarity of the system was that 
 all these liabilities were fixed in amount. No 
 one imagined, when a particular sum was set 
 down as the king's due, or the lord's due, that 
 this sum might in course of time be very in- 
 adequate in value to what it was when the 
 charge was first imposed and the bargain was 
 first made. People thought that the value of
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 4! 
 
 money was the one immutable thing, and they 
 thought so with some reason. As far as we can 
 make out, there had been no great change in 
 prices for five hundred years before the Con- 
 quest, and there certainly was no great change 
 in prices for five hundred years after the Con- 
 quest. The subject then knew what were his 
 regular liabilities to the king, and the tenant 
 knew in just the same way and for the same 
 reasons what were his liabilities to his lord. 
 
 All this was put down in black and white. 
 It is true that the lords of manors and parishes 
 did not begin to keep these registers as soon 
 as the king did, or at least they have not been 
 so well preserved. But there was not at first 
 the same necessity. That which needed to be 
 recorded in the vast estate of the crown was 
 kept well in memory by the standing jury of 
 the parish or manor. 
 
 The towns were generally part of the king's 
 domain. In these there was a regular annual 
 rent paid. In most cases, this rent was enlarged 
 and rendered permanent by the grant of self- 
 government the self-government, or municipal 
 system of the towns, being long subsequent to 
 the self-government of the parish, manor, or 
 commune, and probably imitated from it, with 
 the grant of a special privilege, that of electing 
 their own magistrates, which was occasionally 
 the characteristic of a manor. 
 
 The only persons who had to pay nothing 
 were the clergy. They were supposed to hold
 
 42 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 their lands free from all due, and to owe only 
 their prayers. We shall see how, in course of 
 time, this exemption led to certain distinct 
 results, and that as they paid nothing regularly, 
 they were called on to pay a great deal 
 occasionally. 
 
 The social orders in the state were either lay 
 or spiritual. The latter were either monks, 
 called the regular clergy, who were under the 
 government of abbots or priors, and strove, 
 generally with success, to free themselves from 
 the control of the bishops ; or the parochial 
 and cathedral clergy, who were called secular, 
 and were under the direct government of the 
 bishops. The clergy were entirely exempt 
 from all the jurisdiction of the lay courts, 
 and could be punished in the bishop's court 
 only. 
 
 The lay people in the kingdom were either 
 free or serf. There was, properly speaking, no 
 nobility. We hear of earls and barons, but the 
 title of the former, bestowed undoubtedly on 
 opulent and powerful subjects, was official. A 
 great man was Earl of Chester or Earl of Kent, 
 because he was the king's vicegerent or official 
 there. His title was hereditary because his 
 office was, and it was gradually understood to 
 be hereditary, because the tendency of the whole 
 social system was to recognize the right of the 
 eldest son to succeed to the estate and office of 
 his father. A baron meant only one of the 
 tenants of the crown. In law it meant the head
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 43 
 
 of a family, and in the city of London it was 
 applied to all the citizens. 
 
 It was the invariable custom for all the chiefs 
 of the Teutonic races to be attended by a 
 council. This council was to the king what the 
 jury was to the manor an assemblage of the 
 freemen of the kingdom. Every one was 
 liable to be summoned. But in practice only 
 the most important were summoned. To be 
 absent after the summons was issued was an 
 offence and an affront, and was generally con- 
 sidered a sign of disaffection and intended 
 revolt. Hence, if one of the king's men were 
 bidden to come and did not, or could not come, 
 he had to excuse himself, and to give sureties 
 for his good behaviour, which were subsequently 
 called proxies. This council was the origin of 
 the Parliament, especially of the House of 
 Lords, to which, two centuries after the Con- 
 quest, deputies from the towns and counties 
 were summoned, first as an experiment, and 
 thirty years afterwards regularly, these deputies 
 or representatives sitting at first with the older 
 assembly in the same council and chamber, and 
 in the king's presence. 
 
 The freemen were of two kinds those who 
 were liable to attend their lord in his wars ; and 
 those who were exempt from that service, but 
 had to pay a fixed rent for their holdings. The 
 more opulent tenants were always under the 
 former condition, and most, if not all, of the 
 under lords. But this service was not always
 
 44 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 due to the king. It might be due to a subject, 
 and the greater landowners must have had 
 bodies of retainers who were bound to go to 
 war with him. It was by the aid of those 
 retainers that the nobles of the Conquest rose 
 against the king, fought against him, were 
 beaten, and, finally, were in the main extirpated. 
 In England alone among feudal nations, the 
 king had a prior right to his subjects' allegiance, 
 even against his lord, but it required a strong 
 king to maintain that right. 
 
 The freeholders who paid rent were the 
 yeomen and husbandmen, and the citizens of 
 towns. They could not be summoned to fight 
 except when the realm was actually invaded ; 
 but they were bound, in proportion to their 
 income, to provide themselves with a more or 
 less perfect set of arms and armour. It is true 
 that many of these freemen in country places 
 had other callings besides husbandry. But all, 
 it appears, had land, and this characteristic of 
 the freemen lasted very long, though it seems 
 likely that from very remote times the allot- 
 ments of free labourers were often insufficient for 
 their maintenance. Thus there was always a 
 class of free labourers. 
 
 Besides these there were the serfs or villeins. 
 They are described by many names in Domes- 
 day. They were disabled from leaving the 
 manor or parish. They were not allowed to 
 bear arms. They could not rise above their 
 condition. If a serf wished to send his son to
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 45 
 
 school or university, to make him priest or 
 monk, he had to get his lord's permission and, 
 in historical times at least, to pay for it. He 
 had to pay a fine when his daughter married. 
 If he obtained permission to live away from the 
 manor in a town, and to carry on a trade there, 
 he had to pay an annual sum by way of licence. 
 
 It is said that at first he had no rights what- 
 ever against his lord, who could take his pro- 
 perty, sell him, beat him, inflict any injury on 
 him short of loss of life or limb, without redress 
 or punishment. So the old law books tell us. 
 But the actual records of the life of serfs in the 
 manors do not confirm this view. Such records 
 exist by thousands, and without exception they 
 show that these serfs possessed land like the 
 freemen, and sometimes in quite as large par- 
 cels ; that they had stock and chattels, goods 
 and money, and that they paid sums of money 
 to their lords for the exercise of divers privileges 
 payments which would have been absurd 
 had all their possessions been at the lord's 
 mercy. It may be that the tenacious manner 
 in which Englishmen clung for centuries to the 
 system of fixed payments for land bargains may 
 have had its influence in giving an inchoate 
 emancipation to the slave of the old English 
 time. 
 
 But he always paid in labour. The labour 
 was so many days in the year at certain times 
 of the year. Occasionally he received a small 
 wage for this work, or allowances of provisions,
 
 46 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 or the right to carry a sheaf on his sickle out 
 of the harvest field. From early days, too, he 
 was permitted to purchase exemption from 
 labour by giving money in lieu of labour. His 
 lord would probably be glad to commute his 
 labour for money. Forced labour is rarely very 
 valuable or very trustworthy, and the oldest 
 works on English farming inform us that the 
 
 o o 
 
 bailiff had to watch sharply after serf labour, as 
 the workman was very apt to shirk it. So at 
 last there grew up a system under which any 
 liability could be redeemed with money. From 
 this stage to freedom is not a long step. 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 THE OFFICERS OF THE EXCHEQUER. 
 
 THE Exchequer, as I have said, was established 
 in order to look after and secure the punctual 
 payment of the king's revenue. Till the king's 
 debtor had paid his clues, he was not quit, or 
 quiet, for the latter word is that which is used 
 to denote his having discharged his liability. 
 Nor did lapse of time relieve him. It was a 
 maxim : No time is hindrance to the king. 
 The debtor had to pay the king's local officer, 
 or to attend at the king's exchequer, and tender 
 his money. The money which was paid was 
 weighed and assayed, and it was very perilous 
 to tender bad money at the Exchequer. The
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 47 
 
 officials of the department were always on the 
 lookout to improve the king's revenue by any 
 device which they could think of and sustain. 
 They pried everywhere, claimed all they could 
 claim, and enforced every liability to the utmost 
 farthing. When they were satisfied they gave 
 the debtor a tally, i.e. they split a hazel wand 
 in two, and notched the two pieces equally. 
 The debtor went off with his half, his discharge, 
 and the other half was kept in the cellars of the 
 Exchequer. The tallies were kept there for 
 centuries, and when the system was abolished, 
 and an order was given that the old tallies 
 should be destroyed, the people who were set 
 to burn them, burnt the old houses of parlia- 
 ment down in the process. 
 
 It will surprise none of my readers to learn 
 that the officers of the Exchequer were very 
 unpopular. Their hand was against every man, 
 and when trouble arose, every man's hand was 
 against them ; whenever the people rose against 
 the government and they rose many times in 
 English history their wrath was always directed 
 first against the officers of the Exchequer. 
 These officials were nearly always clergymen, 
 and the life of a clergymen was supposed to 
 be very sacred. But more than once in English 
 history a bishop has been murdered by an in- 
 furiated mob, because he was associated with, 
 and administered the hated exchequer. Thus 
 they murdered Bishop Stapledon, in 1327, and 
 Bishops De Moleyns and Aiscough, in 1450.
 
 48 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 It may, therefore, well seem strange that 
 what was so prying and so unpopular should 
 have been the principal instrument by which 
 the English citizen has secured his rights and 
 liberties. But a little reflection will show how 
 this has come about. In the first place, the 
 expression, rights and dues of the crown, neces- 
 sarily imply limitation. There is nothing due 
 from a slave, because all he has, including his 
 own person, belongs to his master. If the king 
 might help himself as he pleased out of his 
 subjects' pockets, and to any extent that he 
 liked, as some of the flatterers of James I. said 
 he could, the pretence of property would 
 speedily vanish, to be followed soon after by 
 the pretence of liberty. The claim of the 
 crown, therefore, was a definite and fixed 
 quantity, which could not be arbitrarily ex- 
 ceeded. 
 
 Besides, it \vas always considered to be an 
 equivalent for some service rendered. The 
 feudal system may have been oppressive, but 
 it was founded on a theory of reciprocal justice. 
 If the king took dues, he was bound to ad- 
 minister justice. If he called out his people in 
 war, for the defence of the kingdom, he was 
 bound to take his part in the defence. If he 
 claimed allegiance, he was responsible to his 
 people. If his people contributed to his state, 
 he was understood to keep the peace, i.e. to 
 protect them against marauders. In ordinary 
 times, when the kingdom was freed from foreign
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 49 
 
 dangers, all the duties of government were 
 understood to be defrayed out of his estate, and 
 it was as evil a thing for a king to waste his 
 substance on favourites and in prodigal in- 
 dulgence, as it was for him to be oppressive and 
 tyrannical. And in English history, though 
 acts of oppression on individuals have been 
 only too common, it has always been exceed- 
 ingly dangerous for oppression to cause public 
 discontent. 
 
 Again, a regular, methodical, organized in- 
 stitution, even though it occasionally presses a 
 right too far, is an enormously powerful instru- 
 ment of public education. The weakness of 
 the English nation in early times lay in the 
 passionate attachment of the people to local in- 
 stitutions and practices. The boundary of each 
 man's experiences is apt to be the boundary 
 of his sympathies and duties. But nations 
 want cohesion as well as parochialism, general 
 patriotism as well as love of locality. A people 
 should be centralized in certain things, decen- 
 tralized in others. There are occasions on 
 which one's sympathies should extend to the 
 whole human race, to the whole of one nation ; 
 there are others when it is right that they should 
 be limited to one's own family. In well-ordered 
 minds, and in the greatest men, you will find 
 at once the keenest personal affection and the 
 widest sense of public duty a sense of duty 
 which may overleap every limit, and a tenderness 
 of private duty which is incessantly watchful.
 
 5O THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 Many good men limit themselves to one of 
 these functions. No great man has ever existed 
 who was not great in both because he has been 
 wise and earnest in both. 
 
 But it is hard indeed to be educated at once 
 in public and private duty ; and most men must 
 be trained, almost mechanically, in acquiescing 
 in that which is of the highest service. Thus, 
 however much men may differ in the mode 
 under which they wish to effect the ends of 
 good government, and may honestly differ, all 
 are agreed that good government is an emi- 
 nently desirable end, and that bad government 
 is a very serious injury to society. They know 
 that in this country the control over govern- 
 ment, as well as the character of it, is deter- 
 mined by parliamentary elections, and in no 
 other way. But in hardly any case, especially 
 in the metropolis, do the number of those who 
 record their votes represent more than a fairly 
 high percentage of the electors, while a very 
 large number of persons, to whom, we may 
 conclude, wisdom in the administration of public 
 affairs is an object, are too indolent or too in- 
 different to record their judgment. But we live 
 at a time when knowledge is disseminated, when 
 every opportunity is given for the free expres- 
 sion of opinion, and the means of communication 
 are obvious and convenient. 
 
 The existence of a permanent class of officials, 
 who were early recognized as being responsible 
 for the advice they gave the king, and the action
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 5! 
 
 which followed on that advice, has been the 
 origin of that doctrine, which has been very 
 slowly developed, of responsibility of the advisers 
 of the crown, and the irresponsibility of the 
 crown itself. Centuries passed before the 
 doctrine was finally settled. But the principle 
 now fully admitted has done more to make the 
 English constitution stable than anything else. 
 
 The English people has never been patient 
 under oppression. It rose against the mis- 
 government of John (1216), and had he not 
 died opportunely, would have deposed him. It 
 rose against his son ; and had not the first 
 Edward been a far wiser man than his father, 
 would have deposed him too. It deposed 
 Edward II. (1327), Richard II. (1399), Henry 
 VI. (1461), Charles I. (1648), and James II. 
 (1688). However adversely these acts may be 
 criticized, no one can doubt that, in each case, 
 there was a widely prevalent opinion that the 
 State was in danger from misgovernment. In 
 every case the reputed misconduct of the king 
 was visited by the punishment of his chief 
 advisers. They were all officers of the Ex- 
 chequer. 
 
 Even at this day, the machinery of the govern- 
 ment is centred in that ancient institution. The 
 head of the government is the chief officer of 
 the Treasury the minister who is immediately 
 responsible for the public expenditure, and the 
 taxation which is necessarily connected with it. 
 The second officer of the government is the
 
 52 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 minister whose business it is to adjust the 
 burden of taxation in the fairest and most 
 equitable way. The heads of all other depart- 
 ments have to submit the charge of their part of 
 the public service to the Treasury or public 
 Exchequer first, and to the House of Commons 
 afterwards, which sits in judgment, a jury of 
 the whole nation on the action of the ministry, 
 and the machinery by which it is to be carried 
 out. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE KING'S TEACE, AND THE SUBJECT'S DUES. 
 
 IN modern times, it is said that the machinery 
 of parliamentary government is carried on by 
 the ministerial party, criticized and corrected by 
 the opposition. The existing government rules, 
 their opponents examine into and impugn their 
 rule. But this is the immediate result of the 
 system which the Norman kings introduced, and 
 the present condition of things is as much the 
 descendant of that ancient system as the present 
 queen derives her pedigree and title from Saxon 
 Egbert and Norman William, as the mass of 
 the English people are derived from the men 
 who were the inhabitants of England eight cen- 
 turies ago. The history of a nation is con- 
 tinuous. We are what we are, because we have 
 inherited the customs as well as the blood of
 
 HIS" RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 53 
 
 our ancestors. These customs, though altered, 
 defaced, or modified, have not been lost, and 
 in many particulars would as well be restored 
 in something like their old shape. 
 
 In those early times the two parties were, the 
 king and his officials on the one side, the people 
 on the other. There were particulars in which 
 king and people agreed. It was expedient, nay 
 necessary, that the peace should be kept ; and, 
 considering the times, the peace was kept 
 wonderfully well. For a few years England 
 endured, in a modified way, what the Germans 
 and French endured for centuries a robber 
 aristocracy. But generally the country was too 
 strong for them, for all classes of society were 
 against them. The whole political education of 
 England tended towards this result, that the 
 peace must be kept ; that the law must be obeyed 
 by the highest as well as the lowest. The 
 Church was as national as the State, and though 
 the authority which all western Christendom 
 recognized was also recognized in England, the 
 Pope found he could never make a political 
 party in England. 
 
 One of the reasons, and indeed the principal 
 reason, why the peace was kept so well was, 
 that nearly everybody, from the king to the 
 serf, was engaged in husbandry at some time 
 or other in the year. There were forests and 
 waste places where wild animals, hunted by the 
 king and his grandees, ranged. But these wild 
 animals were not bred, only reserved for the
 
 54 THE BRITISH CITIZEN t 
 
 sport of a few persons. I have read thousands 
 of accounts, giving minute details of agriculture 
 on cultivated land, and I have never once found 
 a complaint that wild animals had wasted the 
 crops. I doubt whether all the wild stags, wild 
 cattle, and wild boars, in England six centuries 
 ago, were as numerous as foxes in England are 
 now. 
 
 Everybody cultivated land. Everybody went 
 to market to buy and sell. Within a few miles 
 of every village there was a fair once or twice 
 a year, to which chapmen came and villagers 
 resorted. In these fairs, always placed out of 
 the local jurisdiction, every one was a stranger, 
 and no one was a stranger ; but they always 
 had a vigorous police in the fair. There were 
 highwaymen and robbers, but the trade of these 
 people was dangerous, and retribution sharp. 
 In the village the police of the neighbourhood 
 was kept strictly. In the fair the police of the 
 county was kept as strictly. It was in these 
 fairs that public opinion, as we now call it, was 
 developed, matured, and disseminated. Even 
 as late as the Commonwealth the fair was the 
 great centre of debate. In the " Pilgrim's Pro- 
 gress," Bunyan describes, under the name of 
 Vanity Fair, and with intense religious feeling, 
 the scene which he had often witnessed at Stour- 
 bridge fair, the great mart which was held a 
 mile out of Cambridge, and was famous over 
 the whole world. 
 
 Though these rustics then (for seven men
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 55 
 
 out of eight lived in these old times in country 
 parishes, with all the machinery of local self- 
 government in their hands, and in familiar use) 
 were busy during most of the year on their own 
 holdings, they went for thirty days, or twice a 
 month at least, in the year to the markets and 
 the fairs. Here any man who paid his dues on 
 what he sold or bought had a right to be present, 
 as long as he kept the peace. 
 
 It is true that sometimes when the king was 
 weak, and his servants were negligent or corrupt, 
 crime was frequent and there was danger. But 
 the danger was mainly to strangers and travellers, 
 and the people felt but little interest, except 
 occasionally, in these risks. 
 
 Another reason why the acts of government 
 were criticized and, if need be, resisted, was the 
 fact that all taxation was what people now call 
 direct. The dues payable to king and lord 
 were contributions from the actual substance of 
 those who were taxed. The property which 
 each man had was, so to speak, ransomed, for if 
 he would or could not pay, his goods could be 
 seized and sold, so that his dues should be paid. 
 To be sure, the dues were fixed, and were pay- 
 able at given dates, always carefully recorded, 
 so that he was warned of his liabilities before- 
 hand. 
 
 Hence every man resented strongly any 
 attempt on the part of the Exchequer to enlarge 
 or extend the liabilities to the central authority. 
 It is possible that individuals were oppressed,
 
 56 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 especially if they were unpopular. It is certain 
 that no Englishman cared much if the foreigner 
 was plundered ; and if the Jew was mulcted, he 
 not only did not care, but was rejoiced. It was 
 a very different thing, however, if any attempt 
 was made to revise and increase the fixed 
 charges which the tenant had to pay. One 
 attempt of this kind (1381) shook the govern- 
 ment to its foundations, and nearly led to a 
 revolution. It was never tried again. 
 
 Again, as all Englishmen, from the highest to 
 the lowest, were either directly or indirectly 
 amenable to this Exchequer, it was obvious that 
 all classes made common cause against it if it 
 overstepped its rights. The noble did not resist 
 the just claims of the crown. It would be unwise 
 to do so, as the example might be catching. 
 But every one was interested against what might 
 be the common enemy. 
 
 When John was forced to sign the great 
 Charter at Runnymede (1215), the whole nation, 
 from the earls to the peasants, was against him. 
 He had hired a foreign army, and he thought 
 he could trust the authority of the Pope, who, as 
 he well knew, would protect him. But his 
 foreign soldiers were cowed, and the man whom 
 the Pope had forced on him, Stephen Langton, 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury, was as zealous 
 for the English as the nobles were, as the land- 
 owners and yeomen were, as the burghers of 
 London and other towns were. And when he 
 signed the Charter, and afterwards, relying on
 
 HIS" RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 57 
 
 the Pope's authority, strove to recall or rescind 
 it, he found that the English still resisted, and 
 the Pope found that he could not maintain his 
 pretensions, as all the nation was against him. 
 He was therefore wise enough to yield to the 
 circumstances which he could not control. 
 
 These times are called dark ages. There is 
 no doubt that many of the things with which we 
 are familiar were unknown then. But that of 
 which people have had no experience cannot be 
 a loss to them. In all essentials of spirit and 
 character, the England of five or six centuries 
 ago was the England of to-day. It is easy to 
 show how great were the deficiencies of the life 
 which our forefathers lived, and how violent a 
 contrast it was with that in which their descen- 
 dants now live. 
 
 But it is even more certain that the English 
 people would never have been what it now is, 
 if it had not, even in these early days of its 
 history, possessed in itself all the powers and 
 many of the processes which characterize the 
 modern history of our experience. It demanded 
 good government and fair dealing from its rulers, 
 and it took the very roughest and most effectual 
 means, according to its opportunities, to secure 
 what it wanted. 
 
 Foreigners were so surprised at the English 
 spirit and the energetic resistance of the people 
 to bad rulers and wicked ministers, and at the 
 people going to extreme lengths when their 
 wrath was fairly roused, that we got the name
 
 58 THE BRITISH CITIZEN ! 
 
 of the disloyal nation. Nothing could be more 
 unjust. What the English people wanted was 
 loyalty all round, loyalty of the king to the law 
 and his people, loyalty of the people to honest, 
 just, and wise government. And as long as this 
 sense of mutual duty was affirmed and acted on, 
 matters were sure to come right in the long run. 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE KING'S COURTS. 
 
 I HAVE spoken of the Exchequer as the watchful 
 guardian of the king's rights. Its machinery 
 was, as I have said, that of the village court on 
 the most extended scale. It strove in the highest 
 department of state to treat the nation collec- 
 tively as every parish or settlement or manor 
 was treated within its own boundaries. It had 
 many temptations to do wrong. The machinery 
 by which it could be controlled was rough and 
 imperfect, and ages had to elapse before the 
 machinery could be made smooth, regular, and 
 effective. But I repeat it never was an arbitrary 
 despotism. 
 
 Now let us see what good it did, apart from 
 its mere machinery of action, which, as I said, 
 was continually instructing the nation in the 
 necessity of common purposes, in carefully 
 watching after that which might do wrong. 
 
 I have already adverted to one of those
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 59 
 
 services a service which sprang from the in- 
 cidents of the Conquest. It took the duty of 
 inquiring into homicide where the culprit was 
 unknown, out of the hands of the local authorities, 
 and performed that duty itself. Where this 
 offence, like other offences, was committed in 
 parish or manor, and there was no doubt about 
 the offender, at first, and for a long time, the 
 punishment was left to the locality. 
 
 The maintenance of the king's peace was 
 exercised over places which were out of the local 
 jurisdiction ; over the king's highway, in the 
 wastes, and in the forests. People are surprised 
 at the seventy of the forest laws. But this 
 severity did not affect the mass of the people. 
 Honest people lived in the villages. Those who 
 habitually resorted to the forests and lived there 
 were highwaymen and thieves, and, according to 
 the theory of justice at the time, should be dealt 
 with quickly and sharply. You may depend on 
 it that there was little moan over those whom 
 the king's rangers caught and put out of the 
 way, or, according to the hard usage of the age, 
 when there were few prisons, maimed and there- 
 fore disabled from unlawful practices. In those 
 times, a poacher in the king's forest was a 
 robber, who, when he could not pillage wayfarers, 
 got his living by stealing deer. The ordinary 
 English peasant had abundance of game, which 
 he snared, or trapped, or netted, or hawked, and 
 either put into his pot or sold to the squire or 
 abbot. As late as the seventeenth century,
 
 6O THE BRITISH CITIZEN ! 
 
 country nobles and gentlemen purchased weekly 
 during the winter, enormous quantities of what 
 we should now call game. These must have 
 been captured by the small farmers and the 
 peasantry. 
 
 It is true that a forfeiture of goods, if a man 
 were convicted of a capital felony, accrued to the 
 king, or to the lord, in case the latter had such 
 a franchise or right, and that the coroner, who 
 took the earliest steps on behalf of the crown 
 when homicide was committed, was bound to 
 return evidence as to the goods of the culprit. 
 But the goods of such people as committed these 
 offences were rarely worth much, and there was 
 no such eagerness to procure these convictions 
 as there was to obtain convictions for treason, 
 the offenders in the latter case being generally 
 persons of high rank. But it must be remem- 
 bered that the king paid the judge's salary out 
 of his own personal revenue, and, as I have said 
 before, the essence of the relations between 
 superior and inferior in these times was that the 
 king did a service, and the person benefited by 
 the service paid for it. This is substantially 
 the case now. A government is supposed to 
 fulfil the most important functions in protecting 
 life and property, and in keeping the peace. On 
 these grounds it collects taxes from the people. 
 
 The officers of the king's Exchequer were 
 also engaged in doing justice between man and 
 man, especially in litigation when the rights of 
 property were the stake. As I have stated
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 6 1 
 
 above, the record of ownership within the parish 
 or manor was provided for by the jury of free- 
 holders, and the register of the tenants, by the 
 symbolical acknowledgment of possession, and 
 by the notorious character of the act, under 
 which that acknowledgment was effected. But 
 there were other and much more important 
 matters, as far as the magnitude of the interests 
 was concerned, to be dealt with, There were 
 lawsuits between parties as to the property 
 which a great landowner might have in the 
 manor, which no local jury, and not even a 
 county court, could decide. In such cases, the 
 king's court was entreated to settle the question. 
 It undertook this business, on the payment of 
 certain fees, and its decision was final. In 
 course of time, when persons wished to sell an 
 estate they found that the notoriety which the 
 court gave, and the authority of its decision, 
 was the best security which property could have, 
 and so they set up in this court what were called 
 fictitious actions, i.e. pretended suits of law 
 which were well understood only to mean, that 
 the Court, as it was called, of Common Pleas, 
 witnessed the transaction. In this manner, by 
 taking heed to the king's revenue, by keeping 
 the king's peace, by doing justice between man 
 and man, and by registering the titles to estates, 
 the Exchequer made itself felt, and not without 
 public advantage, in a vast number of familiar 
 and general transactions. 
 
 Here, then, was an institution of government;
 
 62 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 ever watchful, ever present, bent on securing 
 the personal interest of the king, and yet able 
 to confer great benefits on the public, of which 
 the greatest, though it was not recognized, was 
 the right of criticizing the conduct of the govern- 
 ment sharply. If a mere private individual 
 ventured on such a course and there was no 
 great opportunity for him to do so in early 
 times, and for the matter of that, till very recent 
 times he might be very harshly treated, unless 
 his opinion had a great following. Even in the 
 most despotic periods of English history, the 
 king has not ventured to take his people's goods 
 without their consent, or violate common and 
 cherished rights. Unpopular persons and crude 
 opinion he could chastise, or even oppress. 
 
 It is a common saying that the best govern- 
 ment is that which, whatever be its forms, gives 
 the largest possible amount of liberty, and 
 secures the most exact and perfect order. The 
 problem is, how can this harmony be secured. 
 One may see that a result is good, one may 
 wish that the result should be arrived at, but 
 this is very different from obtaining the result, 
 from discovering how far the power should go, 
 and how the check to an abuse of the power 
 should be applied. Order without responsibility 
 may, and a hundred times does, degenerate into 
 frightful oppression oppression which cankers 
 the very life of the people. Liberty at its best, 
 if it has a weak common object, and a strong 
 personal object, may split up society into frag-
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 63 
 
 ments, and be fatal to national life and patriotism, 
 because it weakens the sense of public duty. 
 If the central government becomes overwhelm- 
 ingly strong, if it undertakes to direct not only 
 the conduct of affairs, but the life of the in- 
 dividual, the more honest and sure it is, the 
 more does it kill individual enterprise. If it be 
 harsh and selfish, it will become a great evil, 
 and it may destroy the nation itself. 
 
 Now in England, and from the earliest times, 
 there was a powerful government. Occasionally 
 the ruler was weak and incapable, and disorders 
 of no common magnitude ensued. Except, how- 
 ever, in one reign, that of Stephen (1135-1 154), 
 there was no anarchy. 
 
 But this government was always open to 
 criticism, rough at times, and violent, but 
 effective. If the king had his rights, they were 
 definite, and the subject had his rights too. 
 There was a bargain between the parties, not 
 avowed or defined in words, but just as real 
 as though the contract were reduced to writing, 
 and signed by the parties. Three times in 
 English history, it was reduced to writing. 
 These were, in the Great Charter (1215), in the 
 Petition of Right (1628), and in the Bill of 
 Rights (1689). It was very unsafe to traverse 
 this mutual understanding, and to break faith.
 
 64 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 CHAPTER X, 
 
 THE ENGLISH TOWNS. 
 
 THE population of the English towns was about 
 one-eighth that of the country districts. But 
 at a very early date these towns got the privilege 
 of self-government, i.e. of municipal institutions, 
 under which they elected their own magistrates, 
 assessed their own taxes, in order to pay the 
 king's rent and to meet their local needs, and 
 dealt with their own interests. 
 
 Of these towns by far the most opulent and 
 powerful, even in early days, was London. It 
 was strong by nature and by art. It was on 
 a high bank rising from the Thames, protected 
 on the west and east by streams, then easily 
 defensible, and on the north by extensive 
 marshes. At the Conquest, it made terms with 
 William. It is said that the Tower was built 
 in order to overawe it. It certainly never was 
 overawed. 
 
 There is no date assignable to the liberties 
 and self-government of London. Plenty of 
 dates may be given for the enlargement of its 
 privileges and self-rule. It is probable that it 
 was a municipality from Roman days, and that 
 it had never lost the form which it had. It was 
 an open market with large privileges from time 
 immemorial.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 65 
 
 There were frequent uprisings against the 
 government, for, as I have hinted, in rude times 
 insurrection took the place which plainly ex- 
 pressed popular opinion takes now. Whichever 
 side London took was victorious in the end, 
 and sometimes quickly. The Conqueror, as I 
 have said, treated it with marked favour. It 
 put Stephen on the throne. It had a great 
 hand in forcing John to sign the Great Charter. 
 It took the lead in resisting the mismanagement 
 of his son. It deposed Edward II. (1327), 
 Richard II. (1399),. and Henry VI. (1461). It 
 raised Richard III. (1483) to the throne. It 
 took the side of the Parliament against Charles, 
 and it really was the strength which deposed his 
 son James. The city of London put the house 
 of Hanover on the throne, and kept it there. 
 
 And yet the municipal institutions of this 
 wonderful city, whose history, if it were properly 
 written, is more remarkable than that of any 
 other city in the world, not excepting Athens 
 and Rome, were not essentially different from 
 the picture of self-government which every 
 village in England exhibited. The people 
 managed their own affairs in the villages, and 
 though they did not often elect their own head 
 man, the parson, i.e. the person of the village, 
 or the rector, i.e. the ruler, or administrator, the 
 chairman of their local parliament, the vestry, 
 or assemblage of rate-payers, still the goodwill 
 of the parishioners was very essential or ad- 
 vantageous to the comfort of the head man.
 
 66 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 The municipal institutions of London were 
 copied in other cities and towns. Shortly after 
 the Conquest, the bishops transferred their seats 
 or sees from poor villages to opulent or growing 
 towns. Only one of these persons kept to the 
 little village in which his see was originally 
 planted, and Ely, the place in question, still 
 remains a hamlet. 
 
 These prelates materially aided the growth 
 of the towns to which they migrated. Some- 
 times, as at Salisbury, they created the town. 
 Sometimes they occupied the old town, and 
 made the inhabitants take up with an area near 
 them, as at Lincoln. Sometimes they created 
 a second walled town in which they and their 
 establishment lived, as at Norwich. It is com- 
 mon fairness to say that they did their best to 
 further the material interest of the town in 
 which they dwelt. 
 
 Very rapidly, then, for the creation of these 
 municipalities was the work of a century, there 
 grew up over England communities with repre- 
 sentative institutions, and with acknowledged 
 and well-defined rights. These rights, in the 
 sight of violent men, who had been accustomed 
 to licence, and had seen abroad what war might 
 do to ruin nations, were humble or even con- 
 temptible ; but the king found very soon, and 
 his advisers, especially his legal advisers, saw 
 that there was no power more valuable for 
 curbing lawlessness than these towns were. 
 They were all on the side of order, and enemies
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 67 
 
 of violence, except that which they committed 
 themselves, in order, as they sometimes justly 
 thought, to secure their imperilled liberties. 
 So there grew np a doctrine that if a serf could 
 contrive to live for a year and a day in one of 
 these walled towns, his master lost all right over 
 him. It is impossible to think that so extra- 
 ordinary a breach of feudal law would have been 
 sanctioned, unless the king and the law had seen 
 how useful it was to favour these towns, and to 
 increase their power. If space allowed, I could 
 show from many facts how anxious the king 
 was to strengthen those places which had en- 
 joyed such institutions and were centres of 
 order. 
 
 It was not remarkable that the king delegated 
 authority to the magistrates of the town. The 
 practice was in accordance with the principles 
 of the age. The king could not sit in the 
 court, where every writ ran in his name, and he 
 was presumed to be present. The lord of a 
 manor could not sit in his own court, but must 
 be represented by his steward or deputy. The 
 difference between the ruler and the magistrate 
 is engrained in English habit. 
 
 The enterprise of the towns, and the power 
 of access to them, had a great deal to do with 
 making England a nation. The seaports pro- 
 tected the shores and the merchant shipping of 
 the country. There are many towns, now de- 
 cayed and become mere fishing villages, which 
 at one time were swarming with what were the
 
 68 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 best war vessels of the time. The Kentish and 
 Sussex towns, called the Cinque Ports (Dover, 
 Hastings, Hythe, Romney, and Sandwich), saved 
 England from a foreign invasion more than 
 once. They owed their energy to the system 
 of local self-government. 
 
 Very early the mariners of Scarborough ven- 
 tured to Iceland, off the shores of which were 
 vast fishing grounds. Long after this the 
 Bristol shippers trusted to the mariner's com- 
 pass, and as the Scarborough men reached 
 Iceland through the comparatively quiet seas of 
 the German ocean, these men were bold enough 
 to dare the Atlantic on the same errand, and 
 reached their end. 
 
 The making of a citizen is in his courage. 
 His own interest, maybe, guides him first. 
 But as a general on a campaign assures himself 
 as far as he can of a friendly country, but, above 
 all, resolves to secure the base of his operations, 
 so these venturesome men took care that crown 
 and law should be respected, and that they 
 should have the goodwill of their own neigh- 
 bours. There can be no sustained courage in 
 the midst of permanent enemies. A man may 
 be resolute, and despairingly so, but he cannot 
 have the courage of progress. 
 
 The attachment which these townsfolk felt 
 towards the place of their birth, their bringing 
 up, and their fortunes, was keener than we can 
 have, perhaps, any notion of. The Londoner, 
 from the cradle to the grave, inhabited the same
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 69 
 
 house, frequented the same exchange and guild- 
 house. London was not then, as it is in our 
 days, entirely built over. The streets were 
 narrow, and the houses mean, but they had 
 large gardens in their rear. There were many 
 open spaces in the city the grounds of the 
 numerous monasteries, and the markets. Above 
 all things the citizen of the time valued his own 
 urban institutions, his liberties, and his electoral 
 rights. The same was the case with the other 
 great towns of England York, the capital of 
 the north, Norwich of the east, where the 
 principal manufactures of old England were 
 carried on, and Bristol, the chief city of the 
 west. But there were numerous other towns 
 with their charters of self-government, and their 
 local interests. They were centres of political 
 education, of commercial activity, and of pro- 
 gressive energy. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE SERFS AND THEIR ENFRANCHISEMENT. 
 
 THE mass of the English people was divided 
 after the Conquest into two classes, the free and 
 the serf. The distinction between these two 
 orders consisted in the fact, that in theory the 
 latter could not rise to the condition of the 
 former, but must remain disabled unless his 
 lord formally gave him his liberty. In course
 
 7O THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 of time, however, the distinction between the 
 two orders disappears, and serfdom insensibly 
 vanishes. Let us try to make out the process 
 by which this change was brought about. 
 
 It is quite possible that originally the serf 
 was absolutely a slave, a person who had no 
 rights against his lord, had no property except 
 at his lord's will, and could be constrained to 
 labour for his bare maintenance. But from the 
 beginning, though he was a slave to one man, 
 he was free towards every one else, i.e. had 
 rights as against everybody but one person. 
 No serfdom in England was ever like negro 
 slavery, the slavery of a race. The serf was of 
 the same blood and stock with the free man 
 and the lord his master, of the same faith, 
 worshipped in the same church, and was buried 
 in the same graveyard. 
 
 The first step in his emancipation was the 
 powerful force of custom. Custom and the 
 limitation of rights over others were the funda- 
 mental part of English life. Everybody was 
 liable in some way to his neighbour the noble 
 by military service, the freeholder by a fixed rent, 
 the monk and the priest by their prayers and 
 religious offices, but always only to a fixed and 
 definite amount. I have seen many instances 
 in which a religious body has received a grant 
 of land, on condition that certain services should 
 be regularly performed, and in which the fre- 
 quency of these services was as exactly defined 
 in proportion to the value of the gift as in our
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 71 
 
 own day a farmer might bargain as to the 
 amount of the rent which he should pay for his 
 holding. It was impossible that a large section 
 of the community should be debarred from the 
 advantages of custom. Every one else held on 
 conditions, and at last conditions were granted 
 to the serf. These conditions fulfilled, he was 
 left to employ the rest of his time as he would, 
 and to dispose of his extra earnings as he 
 pleased. 
 
 His labour was fixed, his money payments, 
 or payments in kind, were fixed in the earliest 
 records of manors which I have seen, and I 
 believe exist. If he does not labour, he pays a 
 money due instead ; and if one were to reckon 
 up his payments in labour, in money, and in 
 kind, it would be found that he held his land on 
 much the same terms as the freeholder did. 
 
 His further emancipation was materially 
 assisted by two very powerful forces, the Church 
 and the Law, if indeed much distinction could 
 be made between the two, for the lawyers of 
 the time almost invariably were taken from the 
 clergy. Both of them interpreted law and 
 custom, or enforced justice to the serf, on any 
 occasion which was convenient. 
 
 The Church welcomed the serf and admitted 
 him to her vast privileges and authority. So 
 freely was he allowed to enter into orders, that 
 Henry II., who strove to raise or extend the 
 authority of the crown against the privileges of 
 the Church, insisted in those famous constitu-
 
 72 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 tions of Clarendon, which were the first cause of 
 his quarrel with Becket, that serfs should not be 
 ordained without the lord's consent. The greatest 
 divine, scholar, and Churchman (Grostete) of 
 thirteenth-century England sprang from this 
 despised order. 
 
 Poverty was no discredit in this early time. 
 The great revival of religion which characterized 
 the period in which these changes were going 
 on was that of the two orders of begging friars 
 (1210), the Franciscans and Dominicans. These 
 missionaries revived the almost forgotten practice 
 of preaching. By their vows they could have 
 no possessions. The older orders had lands, 
 houses, money ; and the heads of the great 
 abbeys vied with bishops and nobles in wealth 
 and pomp. But the two new orders did not 
 even possess the hovels in which they were 
 lodged. Hence they were held in great honour, 
 and were treated with confidence. These 
 zealous preachers, wherever they went, advo- 
 cated the natural equality of man, by dwelling 
 on the infinite inferiority of all men in the sight 
 of God, and urged that nothing could be more 
 acceptable than justice to others. 
 
 The clergy, we are told, advised their penitents 
 to manumit their serfs, though our informant 
 adds somewhat spitefully, that they did not act 
 in their own possessions on the advice which 
 they gave so freely to others, and that even at 
 the time of the Reformation a nominal serfdom 
 existed on many of the abbey lands. But it
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 73 
 
 became a common practice for the lords to give 
 licences of non-residence, and to manumit for 
 very small sums of money. The last payments 
 which I have seen made for the marriage of 
 daughters and for non-residence on the manor 
 are in the fifteenth and early part of the six- 
 teenth centuries. The working classes were 
 very prosperous during the fifteenth century, 
 and when they were still under these obligations 
 they appear to have bought up their dues. 
 
 The action of the king, too, must have had 
 its effect. From early times, the king provided 
 himself on occasion with a personal army, en- 
 listed and specially drilled, and distinct from the 
 national militia of freeholders. It was with this 
 army that the wonderful victories were won in 
 France against such prodigious odds at Cre9y, 
 Poitiers, Agincourt, and elsewhere. It was on 
 the model of this ancient army that Cromwell 
 picked and drilled his Ironsides, and, again, that 
 Marlborough and Wellington formed the troops 
 with which they fought, to say nothing of similar 
 feats of discipline and endurance which have 
 characterized British armies in other parts of 
 the world. 
 
 Though the serf was not enrolled in the 
 militia, he could and did enter into the royal 
 army. We learn by accident that one of the 
 most valiant of Edward III.'s captains, who had 
 been knighted by him, and put into an office of 
 great trust, was born a serf, and had fought his 
 way up to fortune and rank. Now the age of
 
 74 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 Edward III. was one in which the pride of 
 birth was arrogant to an extreme, and it may 
 be doubted whether there was any other country 
 in Europe but England, in which a serf could 
 have risen to the dignity of a kinght, for knight- 
 hood put its recipient almost on a level with the 
 king's peers if, indeed, a noble who had not 
 received knighthood was not inferior to a 
 commoner who had. 
 
 In this manner the condition of the lowest 
 class in society was gradually rising. In other 
 countries it was more and more depressed. 
 The French peasant was made to bear all the 
 weight of taxation, till he became, perhaps, 
 more miserable than any one in the world. Nor 
 was the condition of the German peasant better. 
 After the great change which came over the 
 course of European trade, when Egypt in 1516 
 was conquered by the Turks, and the Cape 
 passage became the only road which remained 
 open for the commerce of the East, the sources 
 of that wealth which was so considerable for 
 Italy and the Flemish towns were dried up, 
 and the nobles began to oppress the German 
 peasant. The peasants rose in rebellion, were 
 vanquished, and were thrust down into more 
 hopeless servitude. 
 
 A century and a half before this time (1358), 
 the French peasantry tried to better their con- 
 dition by an insurrection, in which they were 
 also defeated and driven into a lower position 
 than they even occupied before. In both cases,
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 75 
 
 though there was war going on, the combatants 
 suspended their hostilities and combined to put 
 down the outbreak. These were the only 
 occasions in which the common people, as they 
 were called in these two countries, tried to 
 better themselves by force of arms, until, of 
 course, the terrible uprising of the French 
 Revolution (1789). 
 
 In England, however, there occurred an in- 
 surrection (1381) from which, though it collapsed 
 and was to all appearances a failure, results of 
 the most important kind ensued, results which 
 entirely modified the domestic history of this 
 country, and led to the virtual emancipation of 
 the serfs. 
 
 The only relic of the ancient system which 
 has survived to our day is the tenure which is 
 known as copyhold. In this tenure, the manor 
 court registers successions and conveyances. It 
 is not at all unlikely that such an evidence of 
 title was an advantage, for even now, though a 
 copyholder may compel the enfranchisement of 
 his estate, many estates of this kind still exist. 
 In ancient times the occupancy of such property 
 marked the social condition of the holder, but 
 as early as the fifteenth century it only indicated 
 certain pecuniary liabilities.
 
 76 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE EVENTS WHICH ASSISTED THE SERF. 
 
 I SHALL now attempt to point out by what 
 course of events the English serf became 
 virtually free, apart from those influences and 
 tendencies which have been stated above. The 
 circumstances may be exactly traced, and though 
 complicated, can all be discovered and be 
 assigned their several forces. 
 
 It will be remembered that labour rents were 
 generally convertible into money payments at 
 an early period. In course of time they were 
 universally so commuted, these payments being 
 a little less than the ordinary rate of wages pay- 
 able for the service. These payments became 
 part of the regular income of the superior lord, 
 and are always entered as the first item of his 
 income in the annual balance-sheet which was 
 always made up on every estate ; these balance- 
 sheets still exist by thousands in public and 
 private collections. 
 
 When everything of this kind had long been 
 settled and acknowledged, Europe was visited 
 (1348) with a prodigious calamity in the form 
 of a destructive pestilence. It treated every 
 country alike, and it is calculated, with great 
 probability, that a third of the people perished 
 within a few months. The consequence was a
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 77 
 
 very great rise in the price of labour and for 
 everything which had to be bought, with the 
 exception of food, which, of course, as there were 
 fewer mouths to consume it, did not feel the 
 same rise. In consequence, the profits of the 
 more opulent landowners and agriculturists fell 
 to next to nothing. They were forced to 
 abandon agriculture, and to let their land and 
 stock together on the best terms they could. 
 
 They tried to regulate the wages of their 
 hands by act of Parliament. But the,, law, 
 though re-enacted again and again, was not 
 powerful enough to arrest the rise. They could 
 not get back to the old rates of wages even for 
 the farm hands, and were of course powerless 
 to control the price of whatever else they needed 
 to buy for the cultivation of their fields. Besides, 
 the labourers combined together, and when the 
 law fined some persons few we may conclude 
 from the whole number who took more wages 
 than the law allowed the labourers paid the fine 
 out of a common fund. Then they fined the 
 persons who paid more than the customary 
 wages, a pretty plain proof that the employers, 
 in whose interest the law was enacted, felt that 
 they could not attempt to beat down the 
 labourers' wages with any prospect of success. 
 Year after year, as we can see from evidence 
 which exists, and is indisputable, wages went on 
 rising, and of course the rents of the landowner 
 went on falling. 
 
 At this time, too, a very remarkable religious
 
 78 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 movement was going on, and with it, though not 
 perhaps intentionally, a great social movement. 
 I am referring to the effects of Wiklif's teaching 
 and of the instruments which he used. 
 
 Wiklifs youth was contemporary with the 
 great plague to which I have referred. He 
 must have been about twenty-five years of age 
 when that appalling visitation took place. It 
 was especially deadly at Oxford, where he was 
 residing. Before this event it was thronged 
 with students. A distinguished person who was 
 nourishing a hundred years after the plague, 
 says that he counted thirty thousand students' 
 names on the register of the University before 
 that event. 
 
 Wiklif was as considerable a person in the 
 University as Grostete had been a century 
 before him. His learning, in what was then 
 learning, was abundant, and his reputation was 
 early and great. He had the advantage it 
 seems, too, of considerable social position, for 
 he was a scion of a respectable and well-to-do 
 Yorkshire family. 
 
 At this time England was at war with France. 
 Edward III., for reasons which many persons 
 thought valid, claimed the French crown. 
 Whatever the worth of his claim was, it was 
 weakened by the length of time which elapsed 
 between his right (as he interpreted it) accruing 
 and the claim he made. 
 
 During this time the Pope was living at 
 Avignon, and had been there for more than
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 79 
 
 forty years. Every pope was a Frenchman, 
 and was supposed to be on the French side of 
 the quarrel. The Pope, therefore, was not so 
 popular in England as he had been when he lived 
 at Rome and was supposed to be impartial on 
 public questions. 
 
 People naturally believed that the great Death 
 was a judgment for national sins. Unhappily 
 the calamity was followed by manifest scandals. 
 The clergy, secular and regular, became fright- 
 fully demoralized. It has been noticed over 
 and over again that in such calamities men get 
 desperate, immoral, and violent. Even the 
 missionary orders, the friars, fell utterly from 
 their old reputation, and rapidly lost their 
 popularity. 
 
 The court of Rome, then at a small town in 
 the south of France, was in great straits. It 
 was poor, and its administration was costly, as 
 it could not employ its servants without wages ; 
 and it claimed, and indeed had long exercised, 
 the right of confirming or annulling the nomina- 
 tion to benefices, and had even conferred these 
 benefices in expectancy. It was filling offices in 
 the English Church with men who never came 
 near England, but simply took an income from 
 it. At that time it was said that one-third of 
 the land of England was in the hands of the 
 Church, besides the tithes and dues. The clergy 
 were about one-tenth of the adult inhabitants. 
 
 Now, here was plenty of material for discon- 
 tent. Wiklif was emphatically an Englishman,
 
 8O THE BRITISH CITIZEN ! 
 
 who thought that the influence of foreigners in 
 England should be shortened to the narrowest 
 limits. He was devout, and was dissatisfied 
 with the morals of the clergy. He was learned 
 in the learning of the time, and he believed that 
 others would be the better for all the learning 
 he could impart to them. So he struck at the 
 Pope's power, at the authority of the monks 
 and friars, and determined to translate the Bible 
 into English, as well as to undertake a literary 
 controversy. His personal popularity, his con- 
 nections, and the situation of affairs, greatly 
 increased and entirely account for his influence. 
 
 He naturally adopted expedients which suited 
 the temper of his time. A century and a half 
 before, the friars were reformers, whose conduct 
 and preaching rebuked the older orders. Now 
 the friars had become no better than the monks. 
 He determined to create a new order of poor 
 priests, who should revive the best age of the 
 friars, who should surpass them in diligence, and 
 should reach the hearts of the people. 
 
 Now, at a time when the labourers' wages 
 were rising, and the landowners, in and out of 
 Parliament, were seeking to keep them down by 
 all the means in their power, it was natural that 
 the religious order which Wiklif had created, 
 and named poor priests, probably because he 
 wished it to be understood that they were not a 
 monastic order, should be in strong sympathy 
 with the wishes and objects of the working 
 classes. One does not see how they could
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 8 1 
 
 reach them and influence them, unless they 
 strove to assist them in bettering their temporal 
 condition. 
 
 Wiklif does not seem to have laid down any 
 rule for his disciples or agents or emissaries. 
 I make no doubt that he thought it better not 
 to imitate the old orders in this characteristic 
 and invariable feature of their organization. 
 Every order of monks had a rule, or discipline, 
 and was under a regulated authority. So much 
 was this the case that the order itself was often 
 called a rule. Wiklif appears to have thought 
 that no other discipline was necessary than that 
 of religious zeal. 
 
 Furthermore, Wiklif himself began to move 
 away more and more from the doctrines of the 
 Roman Church. This is what always happens. 
 They who dispute the authority of any govern- 
 ment are always led to examine the grounds on 
 which that authority is founded, and ultimately 
 to challenge the opinions of those who insist 
 that this authority should be respected. Just 
 the same course of events happened a century 
 and a half after Wiklif's time. Henry VIII. 
 and his advisers wished to extinguish the autho- 
 rity of the Pope in England, but to maintain 
 the doctrines of the Roman Church. But 
 events were too strong for them, and gradually 
 there grew up a feeling that the tenets of the 
 Roman Church were as unsatisfactory as its 
 authority. 
 
 It does not seem that Wiklif s powerful friends
 
 82 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 were greatly offended by the growth of his 
 opinions. On the contrary, they rather pro- 
 tected him ; for it seems that at this time the 
 wealthy clergy were nearly as unpopular as the 
 Papal authority was. 
 
 CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE INSURRECTION OF THE SERFS. 
 
 I SAID above that the working classes united 
 together to pay the fines which the law levied 
 on them for taking higher wages than the law 
 allowed, and that these unions were, as we 
 are expressly told by contemporary writers, as 
 universal as they were powerful. But it was 
 impossible for the workmen by themselves to 
 carry out this process or to find the agents for 
 it. It was the essence of that old society that 
 every one knew what his neighbour was about. 
 The whole machinery of local justice was based 
 on this presumption. Men were held respon- 
 sible for the misdoing of their fellows to an 
 extent which we cannot realize, and, in order 
 to be responsible, it was necessary that they 
 should know all that could be known of their 
 neighbours. 
 
 But the case was different with the clergy. 
 They were amenable to Church authority only. 
 It is true that the king had made good his 
 authority against them, at least in everything
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 83 
 
 that was supposed to affect his dignity, or to 
 bring them within the penalties of treason. 
 
 Besides, they were expected to roam about, 
 preaching and teaching. There was nothing 
 in the system of Wiklif's priests which was at 
 variance with the practice of the time. On the 
 contrary, they were only doing what the friars 
 had done, with great acceptance, for a long 
 time. The manner of their preaching was very 
 familiar, and as yet they were careful of the 
 matter of their preaching, or perhaps nobody 
 beyond the working men paid much attention 
 to what they said. 
 
 It is plain that these poor priests supplied the 
 organization which the work-people could not 
 have created themselves, and were the treasurers 
 of the fund subscribed for common purposes. 
 We come to this conclusion, partly because we 
 know of no other agency which could have 
 been employed, partly because we know that 
 there was a powerful and secret combination, 
 partly because the general judgment of the time 
 fastened on the poor priests the responsibility 
 of the events which followed. They are dis- 
 tinctly said to have preached about the natural 
 equality of man, and to have called in question 
 the claims of superiority which the noble and 
 wealthy classes made, and had for so long a 
 time given effect to. 
 
 One of the expedients which the landowners 
 bethought themselves of in this very serious 
 crisis of their fortunes, was a revision of the
 
 84 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 bargain which they had made with their de- 
 pendants or serfs long before, when they ac- 
 cepted a fixed sum of money in lieu of labour. 
 In theory, the serf, as the lawyers told them, 
 held at his lord's will. In practice he had, at 
 a period more or less remote, paid for his hold- 
 ing by his labour. His lord had agreed to take 
 money in place of labour. But at the present 
 time the labour cost twice as much as the com- 
 mutation came to. It was not, they argued, 
 unfair that this bad bargain should be revised, 
 and a new one entered into which was more 
 just to the landlord. 
 
 They proceeded to put this plan into execu- 
 tion, and to imprison those who resisted pay- 
 ment. They took the same steps with some 
 of the poor priests who were more imprudently 
 outspoken than others were. The time seemed 
 favourable. The king was a child. His prin- 
 cipal guardian, John of Gaunt, had become very 
 unpopular, and his half-brothers, a great deal 
 older than he was, were already distinguished 
 by violence and misconduct. 
 
 In an instant, and on the same day, there 
 broke out an insurrection which extended over 
 nearly the whole of England. It is known in 
 history as Wat Tyler's rebellion, but historians 
 have been very much in the dark as to the 
 causes which brought it about, its extent, and 
 its consequences. It was strongest in what was 
 then the wealthiest part of England, the eastern 
 counties. The suppression of it was followed
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 85 
 
 by a long weakness on the part of the govern- 
 ment. 
 
 The king and his advisers evidently wished, 
 when Parliament met, to get rid of all the con- 
 ditions of serfage as they existed in their 
 modified form. But the landowners would not 
 hear of this, as was not unreasonable. But no 
 attempt was made again to revive the old money 
 payments. Gradually the estates of the serfs 
 assumed a new form, under the name of copy- 
 holds, and these estates, though they often had 
 peculiar customs, were as much secured to the 
 owners as any other. 
 
 Custom, therefore, and an insurrection ap- 
 parently unsuccessful, but really, as far as its 
 purposes went, a complete success, put an end 
 to a system which had long existed, and seemed 
 likely to endure. We do not know how it was 
 that the money rents of the copyholders were 
 extinguished, while other peculiarities connected 
 with their holdings survived. But we do know 
 that within two or three generations of this 
 memorable insurrection, men of family and 
 fortune purchased copyholds, now free from 
 servile taint. 
 
 But, on the other hand, in other countries, 
 and especially in France, the lot of the inde- 
 pendent cultivator grew worse and worse. A 
 tenant at will, across the channel, was in a far 
 better position than the owner of land under an 
 inferior or agricultural tenure in England, in 
 very early days. In course of time his con-
 
 86 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 dition became more miserable and more galling. 
 At last, the most tremendous convulsion that 
 the world has hitherto seen occurred, in which 
 the innocent and the guilty, the just and the 
 unjust, perished in a common ruin. This is 
 called the French Revolution of 1789-1793. 
 
 The English people knew who it was who 
 had really wrought this work. The insurrection 
 of 1381 deprived Wiklif of his powerful friends, 
 and he lived on obscurely for three years and a 
 half. His mind was set on political and religious 
 reforms. I mention them in the order in which 
 they occurred to him. His disciples added to 
 them a social reform, carried out, it must be 
 allowed, with culpable violence, but which pro- 
 duced in the end the best results, because at an 
 early date it gave room for the development 
 of the English constitution, by paving the way 
 for the freedom and equality of all Englishmen 
 before the law. 
 
 The weight of the reaction and retaliation fell 
 on the poor priests. They were thenceforth 
 persecuted. In order to stop their mouths, 
 twenty years later a law was enacted providing 
 that no clergyman should preach without a 
 bishop's licence, even after he was ordained ; 
 and it is alleged that much of the violence and 
 misdoing which brought about the great war of 
 succession between the adherents of York and 
 Lancaster was due to the silencing of the 
 preachers. Wise men, who disliked the reformers 
 heartily, saw that universal repression was an 
 error.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 87 
 
 Meanwhile, the artisans of eastern England, 
 where most of the wealth of England was, har- 
 boured the preachers of Wiklifs school. One 
 can only get glimpses from time to time of the 
 secret way in which these teachers of the early 
 Reformation kept up their work stealthily and 
 in danger, for the proof of their activity is found 
 only when they were captured and executed. 
 It was specially in Norfolk that these emissaries 
 of the reformed faith laboured, and more sufferers 
 under the heresy laws perished in Norfolk before 
 the time of Henry VIII., and during his daughter 
 Mary's reign, than in all the rest of England 
 besides. 
 
 I do not here enter into the merits of the war 
 of succession in the fifteenth century, or into 
 those of the struggle between king and parlia- 
 ment in the seventeenth, but it is remarkable 
 that the geographical line which separated the 
 two contending parties on each of these memor- 
 able occasions, w^as almost exactly the same as 
 that which divided England in the uprising of 
 
 CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 THE EARLIEST PARLIAMENTS. 
 
 THE English kings were powerful, but never 
 absolute. Probably there never was and never 
 could be an absolute monarch, for a king must 
 act through agents, and then what he calls his
 
 88 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 absolute power is really theirs. I believe that 
 there cannot be conceived a more painful posi- 
 tion than that of a monarch who wishes to do 
 well by his people, but, being conceived and 
 admitted to be absolute, is obliged to bear the 
 unpopularity of those who exercise all his 
 authority under the shield of his greatness. 
 
 Two things always checked the English king, 
 custom and a council ; the former, it is likely, 
 far more powerful at first than the latter. His 
 council was not that of his servants, but of his 
 critics, perhaps his opponents, occasionally his 
 enemies, whom he had to consult or to conciliate, 
 who gave him advice, which might be very un- 
 palatable, or checked his purposes, which might 
 be more so. There were sure to be differences 
 of opinion in this council, of which the king and 
 his immediate ministers might take adroit ad- 
 vantage, as happened more than once in English 
 history, or there might be unanimity which was, 
 as the case might be, helpful or dangerous. The 
 council was originally composed of all the king's 
 tenants. In time the smaller tenants were 
 excused attendance, and only the great ones 
 summoned. It was a sign of disaffection, per- 
 haps of revolt, if any of these great persons 
 refused to attend, or even neglected the summons. 
 
 The principal occasion on which the king 
 needed the attendance of his council was when 
 he wanted money. In ordinary times, the king 
 was supposed to be able to carry on the charges 
 of government from the revenue of his own
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 89 
 
 estates, and from the customary dues to which 
 he was entitled. If he. wanted extraordinary 
 help no rare event in unquiet times he had 
 to ask for it, and to risk a refusal. When the 
 heads of the people compelled John to acknow- 
 ledge that he could not tax them without their 
 consent, they were only reducing to writing 
 what had been the immemorial custom. But 
 there lurked in this clause what is the origin of 
 all popular power in Parliament, the right of 
 those who were asked to refuse and to give 
 reasons for their refusal. 
 
 Even the most headstrong of rulers, as long 
 as he is of sane mind, does not wilfully wish to 
 be unpopular. Hence there are early traces of 
 a system under which delegates were elected in 
 order to assist at the king's council in relation 
 to the king's necessities. At last, after a more 
 than usually severe quarrel with one of our 
 kings, the leader of the reforming party, or at 
 least of the opposition to the king's purposes, 
 bade every county and every considerable town 
 send two or more representatives to that 
 assembly which had gradually got the name of 
 a Parliament. There is little doubt that Simon 
 cle Montfort, who summoned this Parliament, 
 intended to get the complicity of the people in 
 his political action and plans, i.e. that he sum- 
 moned the men for debate on politics. There 
 is no doubt that he and his plans were exceed- 
 ingly popular, for after his death in battle, the 
 people would have worshipped him as a saint,
 
 9O THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 and his conqueror was obliged to speedily for- 
 give his followers. 
 
 At first there was a taint on the very name 
 of Parliament. It was connected with the 
 history of a rebellion and a usurpation, and the 
 sons of its founder had been guilty of a bar- 
 barous, treacherous, and unnatural murder. But 
 Edward I. was no common king. Thirty years 
 after perhaps at an earlier date, but from the 
 later period the record is continuous he revived 
 the elected Parliament. Exactly six hundred 
 years ago (13 Edward I., 1285) the first Parlia- 
 ment occurs on what is like the modern lines, 
 and from that time to this an institution has 
 been continuously, though with interruptions, in 
 existence, which has been imitated by all civilized 
 nations. 
 
 From the first, these Parliaments were invited 
 to aid the king and to assent to laws. It is 
 said that the king's maxim was, that what con- 
 cerns all should have the consent of all ; and 
 Edward was bent on making extensive altera- 
 tions in the common or customary law. At 
 first he seems to have enacted these changes by 
 his own authority. Soon, however, he put his 
 intended reforms before Parliament. At first 
 the old council and the new representatives sat 
 together. Very soon, however, though the time 
 of the change is not known, the two separated. 
 The old council became the House of Lords or 
 Peers, and generally sat with the king in what 
 was called the Painted Chamber. The other
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 9! 
 
 body, which became the House of Commons, 
 sat, when it was in London, in the Chapter 
 House at Westminster, But Parliament often 
 sat in other places besides London, as, for 
 instance, at York and at Oxford, in the latter 
 place as late as the time of Charles II. 
 
 We do not know who it was who elected 
 these members. There is no early law defining 
 the qualifications of the electors. Generally the 
 Parliament was summoned in order to make 
 the king a grant in aid of his ordinary revenue, 
 and notice was, therefore, unwelcome. But it is 
 certain that all the owners of property were 
 taxed. The taxing rolls for, say, Edward I.'s 
 time are still in existence, and with a little pains 
 one could make a shrewd guess from them as to 
 the population in those parishes of which the 
 records are preserved. The representatives 
 were paid for their attendance, a custom which 
 continued till the seventeenth century. 
 
 The Parliament gradually gained power, es- 
 pecially in weak reigns and in troublesome 
 times. It made the assent of Commons as well 
 as Lords necessary for legislative acts, and was 
 taken into counsel on questions of foreign policy 
 during the first great war with France (1366). 
 In matters which the king did not bring before 
 it, but itself undertook, it presented its own 
 attempts at legislation in the form of petitions, 
 to which the king agreed if he approved of 
 them, or rejected under a civil expression to the 
 effect that he would be advised about it.
 
 92 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 The reason why the two houses, the old 
 council and the new commons, were separated 
 early, was manifestly this. The king generally 
 invited these assemblies in order to lay before 
 them his wants and to invite their assistance. 
 Now, the Lords were his council, his peers, and 
 he sat with them, as the sovereign is still sup- 
 posed to sit on the throne in the House of 
 Lords. There were occasions on which the 
 absence of the king from the chamber where he 
 should sit was interpreted to mean a suspension 
 of business. Now, it was rather invidious to 
 discuss the king's' necessities in his presence, and 
 a custom early grew up of referring this matter 
 to the Commons, who made their grants, and 
 returned them to the council of the Lords. 
 
 Besides, the constitution of the Upper 
 Chamber was very peculiar and very uncertain. 
 The majority was generally of the clergy, the 
 bishops, and heads of monasteries. The lay 
 peers were summoned very irregularly. In one 
 Parliament there might be ninety or a hundred, 
 in another, even in the next year, not one-fifth 
 the number. But the Commons were always 
 present. They were paid for their attendance, 
 and would have forfeited their wages had they 
 been absent. 
 
 It is probable that the Commons selected 
 some one or more of their own number to com- 
 municate between them and the king. At last 
 they hit upon the plan of choosing a particular 
 person, who should preside over their delibera-
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 93 
 
 tions, and should be the channel of all communi- 
 cations between them and the king. He was 
 called the Speaker, because he addressed the 
 king on their behalf. 
 
 At last it was fully recognized that no tax 
 could be imposed without the consent of Parlia- 
 ment, and that this consent must be first asked 
 in the House of Commons. Thus the House of 
 Commons is absolute over the whole revenue, 
 and it is from this power of taxation that the 
 Commons have become at last able to under- 
 take practically the whole government of the 
 country. 
 
 CHAPTER XV. 
 
 THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AND THE ELECTORS. 
 
 IT is stated above that we have no early 
 information as to who the electors were. It is 
 probable that, in the towns, the burgesses were 
 allowed to make bye-laws regulating the mode 
 of election, so that, in course of time, there was 
 every conceivable court of electors, from uni- 
 versal suffrage to selection by a very limited 
 number of persons. The towns, too, were of all 
 sizes. Some must have been very poor places 
 from the very first, but as long as the custom of 
 creating new boroughs went on, none of any 
 considerable size were left without representa- 
 tives. The great towns of later times, such
 
 94 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 as Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester, were 
 villages at an earlier period. 
 
 Each county sent two knights Yorkshire no 
 more, and Rutland no less. Two counties were 
 under a peculiar local government, Chester and 
 Durham, and were not represented in Parlia- 
 ment at all. The representatives of the counties 
 were evidently considered superior to those 
 which were sent from the towns. They were 
 paid higher wages, they were occasionally con- 
 sulted, after and in the absence of their town 
 colleagues, and for a long time the Speaker was 
 always selected from this contingent. 
 
 Additions were made to the boroughs, appa- 
 rently on no intelligible principle. The boroughs 
 in Cornwall, Wilts, and Surrey, were very 
 numerous, and it is difficult to believe that some 
 of these were ever considerable places. The 
 king was supposed to bid them send members 
 at his discretion. Sometimes the town refused 
 to obey the mandate, for the charge of the 
 member's wages was heavy, and was met by 
 taxing the townsfolk. Sometimes the inhabitants 
 petitioned against the costly honour. 
 
 The two English Universities, on the other 
 hand, after the Reformation, petitioned Eliza- 
 beth for the privilege of representation. The 
 queen rejected their prayer, but James con- 
 ceded it. This representation was accorded 
 on the ground that under it the king would 
 have the advice of lawyers learned in that 
 branch of jurisprudence which found no favour
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 95 
 
 with the common lawyers, viz. the Roman 
 law. 
 
 The nomination of members was made in the 
 counties at the county court, and the election 
 was by a show of hands. It does not seem that 
 a poll was ever demanded or taken, and the 
 sheriff, who was the returning officer, who filled 
 up the writ and returned it with the names into 
 the proper office, must have exercised this dis- 
 cretion, in case there were a plurality of nomi- 
 nations, in deciding who were the candidates 
 favoured by the majority. 
 
 We are not told who were the electors, till a 
 statute of 1406 informs us. In that year the 
 Commons petitioned the king that the sheriffs 
 should give fifteen clear days' notice of the elec- 
 tion. The petition was granted, and a law, as 
 the custom then was, passed on it. But this 
 was, it seems, only intended to reaffirm and 
 enforce ancient custom, for seven years before a 
 return after six days' notice was acknowledged 
 to be an irregularity, and one that should not 
 be a precedent. 
 
 But in this same Parliament, the right to the 
 franchise was decided, after a petition to the 
 effect made by the Commons to the king, to 
 belong to all suitors in the county court and 
 others a form of words which implies that the 
 act bestowed universal suffrage in the counties. 
 The sheriff and the electors were to seal the 
 writ. The use of seals was universal. The 
 poorest man had his seal, and needed to use it
 
 96 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 occasionally, for a seal was more important in a 
 document than a signature. One of the com- 
 monest kinds of seal among poor persons was a 
 coin. In 1685, when Bunyan feared that he 
 would be again subject to persecution, he made 
 over all his goods by deed of gift to his wife, 
 and sealed the document with a twopenny piece. 
 It is quite clear that the Act of 1406 conferred 
 a very wide suffrage, and that the privilege was 
 valued and exercised, for in 1430 the Commons 
 petition to the effect that the knights of the 
 shire had been chosen by " outrageous and ex- 
 cessive numbers of people of small substance," 
 and that in future the electors shall have a free- 
 hold worth a clear forty shillings annually. It 
 was further demanded that the elected knights 
 
 ^> 
 
 should reside in the county which chose them. 
 The petition was granted, and an act passed on 
 it. Ten years afterwards, it is further enacted 
 that the freehold must be in the same county. 
 
 This restricted franchise remained the only 
 qualification in the counties till 1832, i.e. it 
 lasted exactly four centuries. The change cut 
 away from the parliamentary franchise in the 
 counties, all copyholders, all leaseholders, and 
 all tenants at will. The copyholders were, as 
 I have said, the partially enfranchised serfs. 
 Since the landowners had given up cultivation 
 on their own account, the tenants on leases or 
 at will had become very numerous. There is 
 no reason to believe that the freeholders had 
 increased in numbers.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 97 
 
 It may be interesting to discover what kind 
 of qualification that was which remains to this 
 day in the counties. If one takes the ordinary 
 rent of arable land at the time, and this was the 
 best of the cultivable land, we shall find it to 
 have been about sixpence an acre, scarcely ever 
 more, very often less. The qualification is 
 therefore eighty acres of arable land. But it 
 is certain that such a holding involved, on an 
 average, common rights in the common pasture 
 to about an equal extent, for in those days at 
 least half the land in every parish was unen- 
 closed, open, and free for pasture to all the 
 inhabitants. Furthermore, the quantity of the 
 land represented by the value, must be free 
 from all outgoings or charges. This may mean 
 even taxes, it certainly means any rent charge, 
 or due upon the land ; and I am pretty sure 
 that when the law was enacted it meant a 
 qualification which was very nearly like what 
 ^200 a year for land would be in our day, and 
 that it was quite as infrequent a holding as a 
 freehold estate of ^200 a year is now. In 
 course of time the value of land rose consider- 
 ably, and the qualification sank in value, till at 
 last, in our own days, what was intended to be 
 a powerful barrier against persons of mean 
 fortune, became the means for creating what 
 has been called a faggot vote, or even a fictitious 
 franchise. 
 
 During the seventeenth century, Cheshire and 
 Durham, with the cities in them, were admitted
 
 98 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 to the franchise ; and towards the close of that 
 century, the last borough which was newly 
 created was given representatives by Act of 
 Parliament. In 1707, Scotland was incor- 
 porated with England. In 1801, Ireland was 
 united to Great Britain, and considerable 
 changes were made in the representation of 
 both kingdoms. But there was no change of 
 any important character in the franchise of the 
 electors, and no steps were taken to transfer 
 representations from decayed towns to new 
 centres of population. The manufacturing in- 
 dustry of England had first been placed in the 
 eastern counties. Thence it slowly extended, 
 and finally migrated to the south and west. At 
 a later period, it moved from its second home 
 to the north-west and north-east of England ; 
 and that part of the country which, only two 
 centuries ago, was the wildest and poorest part 
 of the kingdom, is now the richest and most 
 densely peopled. 
 
 At last, in 1832, a great change was made, 
 and the towns of the north were enfranchised 
 at the expense of the south. In 1867, a very 
 extensive franchise was given to the inhabitants 
 of the towns. In the past year (1884) the 
 same franchise was given to the inhabitants of 
 the counties, so that now the county folk have 
 obtained the same political rights which they 
 seem to have had during the twenty-four years 
 which elapsed between 1406 and 1430.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 99 
 
 CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 THE PLACE OF PARLIAMENT IN THE CONSTITUTION. 
 
 FROM the very first, the Parliament, particularly 
 the House of Commons, not only met to dis- 
 cuss the king's wants, and the best means by 
 which the wants should be aided, or to debate 
 on business which the king put before them, 
 but to petition the king for such changes in the 
 law as might be deemed expedient, and to 
 receive and debate petitions for the redress of 
 grievances suffered and complained of by private 
 persons. It is an ancient and inalienable right 
 of Englishmen to petition Crown and Parlia- 
 ment for the remedy of wrongs, and, by implica- 
 tion, it is the inherent right of Parliament to 
 discuss these wrongs and suggest a remedy for 
 them. 
 
 During the earlier times in which the House 
 of Commons became very powerful, i.e. for the 
 first quarter of the fifteenth century, it generally 
 proceeded to legislate by presenting a petition 
 on some subject. The king granted or refused 
 its prayer ; and if the former was the result, the 
 law officers of the crown were entrusted with 
 the duty of drawing up an Act of Parliament in 
 accordance with the terms of the petition. The 
 various statutes were written out on a single 
 roll, and the whole treated as one Act, of which
 
 IOO THE BRITISH CITIZEN ! 
 
 the particular enactments were called chapters. 
 A committee of Lords and Commons was often 
 appointed to be present at the codifying of these 
 petitions, for complaint was occasionally made 
 that the king's servants introduced material 
 changes into the words or the purport of the 
 petition which had been granted. To the pre- 
 sent day, the work of a parliamentary session 
 is considered to be one Act, of which the several 
 laws are so many chapters. 
 
 There was a reason why the Commons legis- 
 lated by petition. In the first place, they could 
 in this way get an Act of Parliament without 
 the consent or action of the Lords. In this 
 manner they got the two Franchise Acts of 
 1406 and 1430. In the same way the clergy 
 (1400) procured an Act on their own petition, 
 under which sheriffs in counties and mayors in 
 towns were constrained to execute heretics by 
 burning, though neither Lords nor Commons 
 had agreed to the petition. Their prayer, how- 
 ever, became law, and remained a reputed law 
 till 1676, when it was formally repealed. 
 
 In the next place, they were able in this 
 manner to deal with business which was not 
 put formally before them by the king and his 
 ministers. Parliament had right of speech and 
 debate. But it was long doubtful whether this 
 right extended from matters on which the king 
 asked their advice or consent to matters in 
 which he would be offended by their treating 
 the subject at all. For a century at least, per-
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. IOI 
 
 haps for nearly two centuries, individual members 
 of the House of Commons who ventured on 
 handling subjects which were distasteful to the 
 king and court, were in a condition of peculiar 
 peril. One of the most eminent men in parlia- 
 mentary history (Sir John Eliot) was imprisoned 
 till death, for words said in Parliament. It was 
 only at the Restoration that the right of speech 
 in Parliament was formally declared to be privi- 
 leged. Even at present, no motion can be 
 made affecting the rights of the crown without 
 the formal assent of the crown to such an action. 
 
 The Houses of Parliament sit for the redress 
 of grievances. Hence any member, due regard 
 being had to decorum and order, may question 
 any minister of the crown on any matter of 
 alleged wrong, and till recently could debate 
 a petition. This latter right was suspended 
 because it was abused, but could be revived if 
 it were required. Since the debates of the 
 House of Commons have been published, the 
 necessity for the discussion of private wrongs in 
 Parliament has been greatly diminished. 
 
 In early days, elections were frequent; the 
 House of Commons as elected rarely sitting 
 beyond one session, and that generally a short 
 one. As the principal object of summoning the 
 House was the king's want of money, sovereigns 
 who could contrive to make both ends meet out 
 of their ordinary revenue, had no need to call 
 a Parliament. Thus Henry VII. was wealthy 
 and parsimonious. He was fond of money, but
 
 IO2 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 he was not popular, and he did not desire to 
 consult his Parliaments. He reigned for nearly 
 twenty-four years, and he only called seven 
 Parliaments. 
 
 But the king could hold a Parliament together 
 as long as he pleased. Henry VIII. kept one 
 together for six years. The Long Parliament 
 of 1640 extorted an Act from the king under 
 which it could not be dissolved without its own 
 assent, which assent it never gave till the 
 Restoration. The Parliament of 166 1 sat for 
 sixteen years together before the king dis- 
 solved it. 
 
 After the Revolution, an Act was passed 
 reluctantly by the king under which Parliaments 
 were to exist for three years and no more. After 
 the accession of the House of Hanover, they 
 were not to last more than seven years. In 
 practice they have lasted on an average, since 
 that time, for about four years. 
 
 The government cannot exist without a Par- 
 liament. Some of the most important taxes are 
 granted for a year only, and if Parliament did 
 not meet and regrant them, they would cease. 
 The public services of the army and navy are 
 granted for a year only, the discipline of the 
 forces under the name of the Mutiny Act is for 
 a year only, and both would fall to pieces unless 
 Parliament annually renewed them. After 
 money is granted to the service of the crown, 
 it must be appropriated by Act of Parliament, 
 and this Act, though it has become a form, might
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 1 03 
 
 be made a reality, and the whole of supply might 
 be discussed anew. But no person except a 
 minister of the crown can ask for public money. 
 The responsibility of this action is put on these 
 officials. 
 
 The sovereign can dissolve Parliament, i.e.. 
 the House of Commons. In this manner the 
 government of the day, by whom and through 
 whom the sovereign acts, can keep a check on 
 Parliament. On the other hand, the House of 
 Commons can declare that it has no confidence 
 in the government, and then the government 
 must resign, or dissolve Parliament, and appeal 
 to the country at a new election. Under these 
 circumstances, the crown would be unable to 
 keep in its service any minister or ministers 
 who are distasteful to Parliament and the 
 country, for it would be vanquished assuredly, 
 if it prolonged the struggle. 
 
 In this manner, and through his representa- 
 tives, every Englishman who possesses a vote 
 has an influence and weight in the government 
 of his own country, and not of his country only, 
 but of nations whose numbers far exceed those 
 of our own people, and a certain authority over 
 the numerous colonies which Englishmen have 
 founded or acquired. The key to this influence 
 is in the fact that he supplies the means by 
 which the government is carried on, and assesses 
 through Parliament the costs and charges of 
 public business. 
 
 As long as the sovereign was jealous of Par-
 
 IO4 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 liament and considered it if a necessity yet an 
 evil, whose action it would curtail to the utmost 
 of its power, the House of Commons surrounded 
 itself with privileges, held its debates in secret, 
 and visited with severity those who published 
 its proceedings either in vote or speech. There 
 was a time when all these precautions were 
 necessary. But as soon as perfect freedom of 
 speech in Parliament was accorded, and the 
 political opinions of members were no danger to 
 themselves, the motive for this jealous secrecy 
 was past, and the secrecy itself became a mis- 
 chief. For a long time, however, the House of 
 Commons clung to its privileges, and relaxed 
 them only after a struggle. But it was seen 
 that the electors had a right to know how those 
 whom they had put into a position of trust dis- 
 charged their trust, by speech and vote. For 
 nearly a hundred years the speeches in Parlia- 
 ment have been regularly reported. For about 
 fifty years the votes have been published, and 
 the electors have thus been able to form a 
 judgment of the diligence and fidelity with which 
 their representatives have discharged their trust.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 1 05 
 
 CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 THE KING'S JUSTICE AND JUDGES. 
 
 IT is quite possible for a people to have many 
 and perhaps all the guarantees of public liberty, 
 and yet to have a very imperfect system for the 
 guarantee of private or personal liberty. But 
 to an individual citizen, the right, as long as his 
 actions are innocent, to go how and where he 
 pleases, to buy and sell as he wills, to work and 
 be at rest at his pleasure, and generally to dis- 
 tribute his life as he may choose, is even more 
 important than the security of public liberty, 
 though, to be sure, as soon as public liberties are 
 gone, private liberty is in danger. 
 
 The rights of men are of their liberty, their 
 safety, and their property. It signifies nothing 
 whether, as some people say, these are natural 
 rights, or as others, that they are the creation of 
 law. Law should be, and let us hope is, j'ustice 
 and good sense put into writing, and adminis- 
 tered by a competent judge, and the law of every 
 civilized community admits that any man who 
 has committed no offence, should be left freedom 
 of action, should pursue his calling and pass his 
 life as securely as possible, and should enj'oy his 
 property. The law may call upon him to stake 
 all, if a public emergency arises : to subject his 
 liberty to military authority, to risk his life in
 
 IO6 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 the public defence, and to sacrifice his property 
 in whole or part for the public service. It is 
 constantly found that in order to secure the 
 greater part of one's liberty, one must surrender 
 some of it. Good manners have been defined 
 to be a small sacrifice for a great gain. 
 
 The first claim which a citizen has is to equal 
 justice. By acquiescing in the authority of law 
 and courts of law, we imply that the law will 
 deal fairly between us and those with whom we 
 are at variance. Hence they who framed the 
 Great Charter demanded that justice should not 
 be sold, delayed, or forbidden. Even the king 
 should submit to have his claims tried and 
 decided in a court of law, where he is repre- 
 sented, indeed, but not vested with personal 
 authority. 
 
 The king's j udges held these functions. Some 
 tried suits between subject and subject, some 
 tried suits between the king's revenue and the 
 taxpayer, some dealt with crimes or offences 
 against the king's peace. By means of certain 
 harmless fictions, all the judges were empowered 
 to try matters which lay out of their original 
 sphere, but till latterly certain matters were 
 always special to the King's Bench, the Ex- 
 chequer, and the Common Pleas. 
 
 At first it appears that the judges were taken 
 from the clergy. It is not quite true to say 
 that none but the clergy were educated, but it 
 is probable that most educated persons were 
 reputed in some way or other to be clergymen
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. IO7 
 
 within the numerous orders of the Roman 
 Church. There are many well-known instances 
 of persons, who in times before the Reformation 
 held dignities in the Church, deaneries, prebends, 
 or canonries and livings, who were not ordained, 
 but were married men with secular callings. 
 Indeed, till the Restoration and before the Act 
 of Uniformity lay persons were able to hold 
 benefices. Even now it will be seen, by any 
 one who examines a clergy list, that the reign- 
 ing sovereign is a prebendary in St. David's 
 Cathedral. 
 
 However this may be, it is certain that the 
 early judges conferred great benefits on the 
 English people. Their rules were very often 
 technical and narrow, but they were always 
 favourable to liberty and equity. I am sure 
 that the process under which the serfs were 
 gradually emancipated, and their property 
 secured to them, was mainly due to the English 
 judges, who did more by their fair action 
 between man and man, and their honest inter- 
 pretation of contracts, to inspire respect for the 
 law, and to teach men a true community of 
 interests than any other power. 
 
 A notable and, for the matter of that> a very 
 innocent source of royal revenue came from the 
 administration of civil justice. The judges were 
 paid by the king out of his private estate. This 
 was compensated by fees of court. It must be 
 remembered that pleas could be held in the 
 manor court, in the hundred court, and in the
 
 IO8 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 county court. Corporations always had their 
 courts in which they could hear pleas. But in 
 the end, the king's courts absorbed the greater 
 part of all the business which was originally 
 transacted in these local courts, not because the 
 king's judges usurped the business, but because 
 they did it better. It is true that sometimes 
 they compelled the inferior court to submit 
 to the king's court, but they did so because 
 the court they coerced could not be trusted, 
 and because the public voice approved their 
 action. 
 
 It is said, and I can well believe it, that the 
 English judges in developing their system of 
 justice between man and man, declined to accept 
 the civil code of Rome, which Europe generally 
 adopted, and preferred the customary law of 
 England, corrected as it was by statute, from 
 time to time, because the language of the civil 
 code was slavish and imperial. The customs 
 which they upheld were the rules of civil life, 
 under which a free people lived, and they were 
 unwilling to refer private rights to the authority 
 of an arbitrary and despotic power. 
 
 These English judges were originally ap- 
 pointed during good behaviour, not during the 
 king's pleasure. In other words, as long as 
 they satisfied the duties of their office they were 
 not removable. At a later period, and in an 
 evil hour for the people first, and for the king 
 subsequently, they were appointed under the 
 other phrase, and they became as much the
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. IOQ 
 
 enemies of the English people as they had been 
 its defence. 
 
 The king could not sit in his own court. The 
 judges were his deputies, but they were not to 
 be controlled by him. Once, to his and their 
 serious injury, the king (Richard II., 1387) ven- 
 tured on claiming a private interpretation of 
 the law from them. They were unwise enough 
 to answer him, and they paid the penalty of the 
 offence with their lives. Their sentence had 
 to be in open court, to which all had access. 
 
 The judge had to administer the law of Par- 
 liament as well as the common law. Now 
 Parliament may be, and indeed has been, occa- 
 sionally unjust and unfair, has favoured one 
 class of the community at the expense of others, 
 has been mischievously lenient and been mis- 
 chievously severe. Human institutions, it is 
 almost a common phrase to say, have human 
 frailties, and when they can enshrine those 
 frailties in a law, they will give and have given 
 the worst force, because the strongest, to ill- 
 doing. I am not arraigning unfairly the greatest 
 and noblest institution in England without 
 reason, for if what I say were not true, why has 
 there been need to reform the law ? When Sir 
 Samuel Romilly and Sir James Mackintosh 
 began their reforms, there were about two 
 hundred and fifty capital offences on the English 
 statute-books, all originated in the interest of 
 particular kinds of property, i.e. enacted not so 
 much on behalf of the public good, but in order
 
 IIO THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 to maintain private rights, or that part of the 
 law which refers to the relations of subject and 
 subject. 
 
 I have little doubt that it was because the 
 American people, when they were allowed to 
 be independent, saw the danger that legislative 
 assemblies might have private ends in the 
 enactment of law, that they gave the supreme 
 court of the state, and of the federation, the 
 power, for reasons which seemed good and 
 were avowed, to override and even to disallow 
 acts of the legislature. I have often heard 
 eminent Americans declare that this extra- 
 ordinary power of the supreme court is the most 
 precious part of their constitution. 
 
 Now, in an indirect way, this was what the 
 English judges in early times did. They said 
 that Acts of Parliament were only explanatory 
 of the common law, and could not set it aside. 
 And though such an interpretation was per- 
 verted ultimately to mischievous ends, and was 
 made the means of furthering absolute power 
 in evil times, it is still true that there is always 
 a difference between the words of a law and its 
 equitable interpretation.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. I I I 
 
 CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 THE CRIMINAL LAW AND THE JUDGES OF IT. 
 
 ON the whole, then, the constitution of that 
 court which adjudicated in civil cases between 
 subject and subject was worthy of trust and 
 praise. Even in the worst times of public 
 justice in England, it was freest from blame. 
 But the same in course of time could not be 
 said for the other two courts. 
 
 That court which adjudicated on offences 
 against the king's peace was generally desirous 
 to secure order in the country. But unluckily, 
 through the rule that the conviction of an offender 
 for felony was followed by a forfeiture of his 
 goods to the crown, unless, indeed, some patron 
 or corporation had a recognized right, it became 
 a matter of interest with the servants of the 
 crown to press for a conviction, and use unfair 
 means for bringing it about. The accused 
 person was not allowed the benefit of counsel. 
 His witnesses were not examined on oath ; and 
 the counsel for the crown, and sometimes bad 
 judges, did not scruple to comment to juries on 
 what they were pleased to call the unsatisfactory 
 evidence for the defence. 
 
 Juries, too, were liable to fine and imprison- 
 ment, if they gave a verdict which was dis- 
 tasteful to authority. In early times, as I have
 
 112 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 said, the jury were witnesses to the fact, not, as 
 now, judges as to the truthfulness of the wit- 
 nesses and of the general credibility of the 
 whole case for the prosecution and the defence. 
 Now, as sworn witnesses, they ought to have 
 been made liable for any violation of their 
 oaths, just as any perjured person might be and 
 should be. But to inflict such a penalty on 
 them because they gave a verdict which implied 
 that they were dissatisfied with the evidence 
 alleged against the prisoner was in the highest 
 degree unjust. This risk, however, was put on 
 juries till after the middle of Charles II.'s reign, 
 when a decision of Chief Justice Vaughan re- 
 lieved the jury from this unfair responsibility. 
 
 During the existence of an excessively severe 
 criminal code, which was enacted in the sup- 
 posed interests of property, the juries materially 
 assisted the efforts of reformers by refusing to 
 convict, very often, it must be admitted, in the 
 face of the evidence, criminals charged with 
 what we should justly call petty offences, but 
 which were visited with the penalty of death on 
 conviction. Now, it must be admitted that 
 such a course of action was mischievous, because 
 it set oath as well as law at nought. But juries 
 were commended for their action, because they 
 showed in this indirect way that over-severe 
 laws defeat their own objects. When juries 
 refused to allow persons to be hanged for shop- 
 lifting, sheep-stealing, and even for forgery, it 
 became necessary to modify the law.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. I 1 3 
 
 The enormous power which the state prose- 
 cution of an offender had in dealing with the 
 case adversely to the suspected criminal is best 
 illustrated by an instance. In 1692, a certain 
 Lord Mohun, with a Captain Hill, attempted to 
 kidnap a famous actress, Mrs. Bracegirdle. An 
 equally well-known actor, Mountford, attempted 
 to protect her, and was murdered by the assail- 
 ants. Lord Mohun was put on his trial before 
 the peers, and was acquitted by a majority of 
 votes. It was a scandalous failure of justice, 
 and is explained on the ground that Lord 
 Mohun was a very active Whig, who had been 
 often employed in military commands, and that 
 his party was in the ascendant. 
 
 Mountford's widow attempted to avail herself 
 of a right which the law then gave to the 
 nearest representative of a murdered man, of 
 prosecuting the offender by means of an appeal, 
 in which process a peer was tried by a common 
 jury, and, if convicted, could not be pardoned 
 by the crown. To save Mohun, the crown 
 lawyers trumped up a charge of clipping the 
 coin against her father, one Percival, and got 
 him convicted. He was sentenced to death. 
 Mrs. Mountford on this petitioned the queen 
 for her father's pardon, and, we are told, was 
 informed that it would be granted if she with- 
 drew her appeal against Lord Mohun. She 
 did so, and her father was liberated. There 
 can be no doubt, looking at the circumstances, 
 that this was a scandalous abuse of judicial
 
 ii4 TIIE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 power, and that law was strained in order to 
 convict an innocent person, and to procure the 
 escape of a guilty one. 
 
 The eagerness of judges in criminal cases to 
 obtain convictions, and with them forfeitures to 
 the crown, was certainly due to the rule of law 
 which forfeited the lands and goods of offenders 
 on conviction. But it was further strengthened 
 by an evil habit, introduced by the Stuart kings, 
 of giving the judges patents during the pleasure 
 of the crown, and of ejecting them from their 
 offices if they gave the court dissatisfaction. 
 Some of the best English lawyers were treated 
 in this way, and all but the most upright and 
 courageous were terrorized. Hence at the close 
 of the seventeenth century the worst and the 
 wickedest lawyers were found among the judges, 
 and every one who has written on the subject 
 has commented on their violence and cruelty. 
 It has been well said that Bunyan's description, 
 in the " Pilgrim's Progress," of Faithful's trial at 
 Vanity Fair is not an exaggerated picture of a 
 court of law, when Jeffreys, Williams, or Scroggs 
 presided in it. 
 
 At the Revolution the old custom of making 
 out the judge's patent during good behaviour 
 was revived, and a new system was introduced 
 by which a judge is removable only by an 
 address from both Houses of Parliament. Still, 
 their patents became void at the death of the 
 king. This was changed a century and a 
 quarter ago.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. I I 5 
 
 The Court of Exchequer watched over the 
 king's revenue, and decided on suits in which 
 the king and a subject went to law about the 
 king's dues. No very loud complaints are 
 made about the administration of justice by 
 these officials till after the Stuart period began, 
 when they became unscrupulous servants of the 
 crown. 
 
 In 1608, James had, at the instance of his 
 principal minister, laid of his own authority 
 a new tax on currants. A certain Turkey 
 merchant, Bates, resisted the tax as illegal, and 
 the case was heard in the Exchequer. The 
 judges, for reasons which every one has allowed 
 to be monstrous, gave judgment in favour of 
 the crown, and in consequence a new book of 
 rates was immediately published, which imposed 
 heavy arbitrary duties on every description of 
 merchandise. 
 
 From that day the struggle began between 
 king and Parliament which, forty years later, 
 ended in the downfall of the monarchy and the 
 establishment of a republic; for the real question 
 at issue between the first two Stuart kings and 
 Parliament was whether the crown could impose 
 taxes at its pleasure, or must abide by the con- 
 sent of the nation. The question was, indeed, 
 tried anew in the same court, and with the same 
 result, in the celebrated case of Hampden and 
 the ship-money, when a majority of the judges 
 decided in favour of the crown. It was most 
 unfortunate for the Stuarts that they were so
 
 I I 6 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 ill-advised in the instruments of their govern- 
 ment. 
 
 After the Restoration, the government never 
 again ventured to assume to itself the right of 
 arbitrary taxation. Parliament was liberal, trade 
 flourishing, and wealth grew rapidly. But the 
 king employed the same unfortunate agency for 
 increasing his power. He strove to assert that 
 he could dispense with statutes at his will, when 
 the law was not concerned with a private right, 
 and he got the aid of his judges to this inter- 
 pretation of law, if indeed he was not instigated 
 to it by them with the promise of a foregone 
 decision in his favour. He attacked the charters 
 of the cities and towns, and even reduced 
 London to submission by the action of his 
 courts. Had he lived longer, the revolution 
 which was effected under James would have 
 begun under Charles. It is true that James 
 went further than his brother, and was in the 
 end more friendless than Charles ever would 
 have been. 
 
 During nearly the whole of the seventeenth 
 century, the English judges, with rare excep- 
 tions and on special occasions, were as much the 
 enemies of the English liberty, and hindrances 
 to the development of the rights of the citizens, 
 as their predecessors in the same places for 
 centuries before had been friends and aids to 
 them.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. I I 7 
 
 CHAPTER XIX. 
 
 THE LIBERTY OF THE SUBJECT. 
 
 ONE of the most intolerable wrongs which 
 despotism can inflict on men is the power of 
 arbitrary imprisonment without cause shown, 
 and without period assigned for trial and 
 acquittal or punishment. It is and must be 
 competent for a state to detain for a period, or 
 even for a lifetime, persons who are dangerous 
 to others, or who have been convicted of crimes ; 
 and we, in common with other civilized commu- 
 nities, empower judges, on adequate proof, to 
 inflict such sentences. 
 
 But the prolonged imprisonment of untried 
 prisoners is a different matter. If the power is 
 permitted to a government, it is certain to abuse 
 it. There are always persons whose opinions 
 are distasteful to existing authority, or whose 
 very presence is disagreeable, if not dangerous ; 
 and if a sovereign or an administration is em- 
 powered to confine such persons without open 
 trial, it is perfectly certain that the power will 
 be misused. 
 
 It must be remembered, too, that such power 
 is as likely to be abused under what are called 
 republics, as well as under monarchies. There 
 is good reason to believe that the republics of 
 Venice and Genoa, and the free cities of the
 
 Il8 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 Rhine, kidnapped those whom they disliked, 
 and hid them out of sight as frequently as 
 the monarchs of France and Naples did those 
 against whom they took offence. 
 
 In France it was easy for any person who was 
 in favour with the court, to procure what was 
 called a lettre de cachet from the government, 
 empowering him to shut up in one of the king's 
 fortresses, for an indefinite period, any individual 
 towards whom he entertained a dislike, and 
 against whom he was influential enough to be 
 able to give effect to his dislike. It is said that 
 people even obtained blank orders of this kind, 
 and filled the space in as they willed. Of course 
 the king and his government were even more 
 free to use these expedients. 
 
 There is a story that an English ambassador 
 in France, during the year 1752, waited on the 
 minister of state through whose hands this kind 
 of business passed, and found that he was away 
 from the office. As he was waiting his eye fell 
 on a list of persons, written on a paper which 
 lay open on the table, and headed " Prisoners in 
 the Bastile." Inadvertently he looked through 
 it, and on the minister entering the room, he 
 apologized for having accidentally inspected a 
 state paper. The minister assured him that it 
 was of no consequence, and that he made no 
 mystery of the fact. 
 
 " Then," said the ambassador, "can you tell 
 me how a person named Gordon, who seems to 
 be a British subject, is found in the list ? " "I
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. I 1 9 
 
 have no idea whatever," said the Frenchman, 
 " but I will inquire with pleasure, and the man 
 shall be liberated if he proves to be your 
 countryman." On inquiry he was found to be 
 what the ambassador suspected ; but no one knew 
 why he had been put in prison, and the prisoner 
 least of all. He only knew that thirty years 
 before he had been suddenly arrested, why, he 
 did not know, and never could guess, and had 
 been a prisoner all this time. The knowledge 
 that the French government had used this 
 system of arbitrary arrest was universal at the 
 time of the Revolution. It led to the destruction 
 of the Bastile, and contributed not a little to 
 that blind and ferocious terror which led to so 
 many enormities afterwards. 
 
 In the same way, nearly a generation ago, 
 Mr. Gladstone discovered that a similar system 
 was being practised by the King of Naples on 
 some of his political opponents, men of blame- 
 less character and great parts. The conduct of 
 the Neapolitan government was exposed, and 
 the cruelties inflicted on the state prisoners 
 fully described. There is no doubt that the 
 detestation which these acts aroused led to 
 that uprising, the sequel of which was the 
 dethronement of the Italian Bourbons, and 
 the annexation of South Italy and Sicily to 
 the kingdom of Italy. 
 
 Now, from very early times, imprisonment 
 without trial was held by the most ancient 
 writers on English law to be illegal. There
 
 I2O THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 was a writ which was intended to obviate the 
 malpractice. In the Great Charter there is 
 an enactment that no freeman should be im- 
 prisoned without the lawful judgment of his 
 peers, or by the law of the land. The circuits 
 of the judges on criminal business were known 
 as a gaol delivery, i.e. the purport of their 
 appearance at the assizes was to take cognizance 
 of all imprisoned persons, to try them for the 
 offence alleged against them, to punish them 
 according to law if they were found guilty, and 
 to set them free if they were acquitted. To 
 keep a prisoner with a charge hanging over him 
 for an unlimited time was contrary to the genius 
 of English law ; still more to keep him in 
 custody with no such charge. 
 
 When Edward II. and Richard II. were 
 deposed, they were imprisoned by order of Par- 
 liament, both in view at once of the offences 
 which they were reputed to have committed, 
 and for considerations of public safety. It is 
 possible that both these deposed kings were 
 murdered by the hands of those who deposed 
 them. This, if it happened, was the crime of 
 the administration, but not the intention of 
 Parliament. 
 
 Later on, however, and as a consequence of 
 the bitter hatred and feuds which had been 
 created and fostered during the war of succes- 
 sion, the practice of imprisoning those who had 
 offended the sovereign, or were an object of 
 alarm to the sovereign, became more general.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. I 2 I 
 
 Thus Henry VI. was imprisoned in the Tower 
 after his capture in the North, though his only 
 offence was that he had been a rival of the new 
 king. The Earl of Warwick, Clarence's son, 
 was imprisoned in the Tower from his child- 
 hood, and was finally executed on a charge of 
 trying to escape. Courtenay, one of the descend- 
 ants of the Yorkist family, was similarly kept in 
 custody, till he was released by Mary Tudor. 
 Elizabeth imprisoned Hertford and his wife, 
 Lady Katharine Grey, for no other crime than 
 that of marrying against her will ; and James 
 treated his kinswoman, Arabella Stuart, with the 
 same illegal severity. The victims of the High 
 Commission Court and the Star Chamber, though 
 these were legally constituted bodies, were con- 
 ceived to be also unlawfully used, when they 
 were imprisoned. Nor did the Puritans behave 
 more generously. Laud was imprisoned several 
 years before he was brought to trial, and was 
 certainly punished by a court which had no 
 legal authority. Unfortunately, in the early 
 part of Charles I.'s reign, the judges in the Court 
 of King's Bench, who, as I have said, were very 
 much deteriorated from their former high repu- 
 tation, decided that they could not grant the 
 proper writ, even though a prisoner \verc com- 
 mitted without any cause assigned, in case he 
 were committed by the special command of the 
 king, or of the lords of the Privy Council. 
 
 Though legislation negatived this judgment, 
 the judges continued to evade their duty, till at
 
 122 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 last, in 1680, the famous Habeas Corpus Act 
 was passed. This, as is often said, created no 
 new law. What it did was to make it perilous 
 or impossible to disobey the law. It inflicted a 
 penalty of ^200 for the first offence, and ^200 
 and permanent disability for the second, on any 
 gaoler who offended against its provisions. It 
 put a penalty of ^500 on any judge who refused 
 to issue the writ. It put a similar penalty on 
 any person who carried a prisoner out of the 
 kingdom, and in various ways secured to persons 
 a speedy trial. 
 
 This Act, reckoned to be one of the most 
 important in the statute-book, was carried by 
 the exertions of the last man who would have 
 been thought likely to have busied himself with 
 it, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the worst 
 men of a very bad age, the reign of Charles II. 
 It is perhaps not unfair to say that, as he had 
 made himself out of favour with the king, he 
 had some eye to himself in what he undertook. 
 
 CHAPTER XX. 
 
 EDUCATION IN EARLY TIMES. 
 
 THERE is a very general idea that people were 
 very uneducated during the whole time which 
 preceded the Reformation, or that at least the 
 clergy only had any culture and intellectual 
 training. It must be admitted that the greater
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 123 
 
 part of what we should now call the educated 
 classes were, in early times, and generally down 
 to the Reformation, ranked as clergy, and had 
 taken what were called minor orders in the 
 Church. The lawyers, the doctors, the archi- 
 tects, the scribes, and the accountants of the 
 time were almost always described as clergymen. 
 But they were very often married men, and this 
 without reproach or scandal. 
 
 But it cannot be true that education was con- 
 fined to these persons. There was not a single 
 manor in England, put under the charge of a 
 bailiff", for which there was not yielded and 
 transcribed yearly an accurate and minute 
 balance-sheet, in which all expenditure and all 
 receipts were carefully noted down, stock taken 
 to the smallest particulars, and the whole audited 
 and checked. No man's head could have carried 
 all these items, and no system of tallies would 
 have sufficed for such scrupulous and punc- 
 tilious care. 
 
 There were several institutions from which 
 knowledge in what then constituted learning 
 could be derived. These were the parochial 
 clergy, the monasteries, and, above all, the univer- 
 sities. In an estimate of the population given 
 towards the close of Edward III.'s reign (1377) 
 the clergy are set down as ten per cent, of the 
 population. 
 
 As a rule, every English parish contained an 
 endowed minister who was, by the discipline of 
 the Roman Church, debarred from domestic ties,
 
 1 24 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 was educated for his function, and was possessed 
 of considerable leisure, even after the work of 
 his parish and the superintendence of his glebe 
 lands were completed. It was the peculiar 
 function of such persons (and they became and 
 remained, even in the worst days of the old 
 Church, the best of the clergy) to be the peace- 
 makers of the parish, the referees in disputes, 
 and the teachers of the young. We have con- 
 temporaneous evidence as to the good offices 
 which they had effected for generations, and of 
 the services which some of them still rendered. 
 These persons not only selected for special 
 training bright and intelligent boys for the 
 higher learning, but, in order to do so, must 
 have given some general learning to the whole 
 youth of the parish. Sometimes an opulent 
 parish clergyman constantly found the means 
 for sending selected youths to the universities 
 for higher and fuller training. 
 
 I have often found, in searching amon^ the 
 
 7 o o 
 
 relics of pre-Reformation papers, bills for work 
 done, written out by country artisans, smiths, 
 carpenters, masons, and the like, in which the 
 spelling is better than it was three centuries 
 later, and the charges are properly calculated. 
 Such persons must have had some education in 
 reading, writing, and arithmetic. 
 
 The age in which Wiklif began his reforms 
 was by no means a hopeful one. The country 
 had been terribly demoralized by the great 
 plague. But he set himself to translate the
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 125 
 
 Bible into English, certainly not for the prelates 
 and the clergy, but for the common people. Now, 
 the artisans of the eastern counties could hardly 
 afford to purchase the whole Bible, but we are 
 told that they transcribed and cherished frag- 
 ments of this version, hid them carefully, and 
 kept them as dear as life. They must have 
 known how to read them. We can hardly con- 
 ceive any relish for a scroll of paper or parch- 
 ment which was unintelligible to them. 
 
 Again, two generations after Wiklifs death, 
 an English bishop (Pecok) incurred great un- 
 popularity and finally condemnation, because he 
 wrote, though against Wiklif's followers, con- 
 troversial books in English. These books, set 
 out at the very time when printing was being 
 invented in Germany, were intended for lay 
 readers, and we may be sure, from the tone they 
 took, for readers who belonged to the class in 
 which Wiklif's writings were studied and prized. 
 They were certainly not intended for the clergy, 
 since these authorities were grievously offended 
 at the publications, though the books were in- 
 tended to justify them and their order and their 
 doings. 
 
 The English monasteries, especially those of 
 the Benedictine orders, were specially charged 
 with literary duties. There is no doubt that 
 they held schools to which the town youth 
 resorted. Antiquaries still point out the places 
 in the cloister where the monks of Westminster 
 held their school, and what they did was done
 
 126 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 by other and similar monasteries in the kingdom. 
 Those centres of culture were numerous in the 
 towns, and not infrequent in country places, so 
 that it would not be difficult for an ambitious 
 youth to get beyond the education which the 
 parish priest supplied him with. 
 
 The girls, too, were taught in the nunneries, 
 not perhaps quite so numerously as the boys 
 were, but still to some extent. I have seen 
 accounts of these institutions, from which I have 
 found that regular sums were paid for board, 
 lodging, and teaching in those places. When 
 the great revival of learning was brought about 
 in England at the beginning of the sixteenth 
 century, women studied the new learning as 
 eagerly as men did ; and it is probable that 
 Jane Grey and Elizabeth, whose acquaintance 
 with languages, living and dead, was equal to 
 that of men, were only types of a proficiency 
 arrived at by many of their sex. 
 
 There were poets, too, who wrote in English 
 for Englishmen. Sometimes, like Chaucer, they 
 contemplated a very large audience ; sometimes, 
 like the author of " Piers Plowman," they wished 
 to undertake the more dangerous task of calling 
 attention to the vices and shortcomings of privi- 
 leged orders. They would not have written 
 except for readers, and in the latter case for 
 readers among the lower middle classes. 
 
 While reading an enormous number of papers 
 written in the Middle Ages and after the Refor- 
 mation, nothing has struck me more forcibly
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 12 7 
 
 than the decline in general education which 
 marks the later period. A bold, plain, legible 
 hand degenerates into an almost illegible scrawl, 
 into very bad grammar and worse spelling. The 
 common handwriting of Elizabeth's reign is 
 much harder to make out than that of Henry's, 
 and in that of the early Stuarts it is even worse. 
 
 The destruction of the monasteries, I am 
 convinced, was a very serious shock to learning. 
 Much worse, however, was the impoverishment 
 of the clergy, and the new system of eccle- 
 siastical government and order. The adminis- 
 tration, it is true, pretended to check the 
 mischief, and promised to employ the wealth of 
 the monasteries for the advancement of learn- 
 ing. But the king broke his word ; perhaps he 
 was too much pressed for money to keep it. 
 Some few foundations were made, more were 
 projected, but all languished. 
 
 One of the expedients which was adopted 
 was to put an obligation on the grantees of 
 abbey lands, to endow schools out of a portion 
 of that which they received. Hence, in the 
 early days of Edward VI., the principal bills 
 passed in Parliament were private Acts for the 
 endowment of schools founded by the allottees 
 of abbey lands. The old centres of local educa- 
 tion had been destroyed, and something was 
 needed to take their room. At first the endow- 
 ment was small, inadequate, and had but little 
 effect. In course of time, however, in many 
 places, land originally of trifling value has multi-
 
 128 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 plied a thousandfold, and the present generation, 
 though not always the proper person, enjoys 
 the proceeds of a revenue which the original 
 founder neither contemplated nor intended. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI. 
 
 THE ENGLISH UNIVERSITIES. 
 
 THE origin of the English universities is very 
 obscure. It has been rendered more obscure 
 by an absurd quarrel between the Oxford and 
 Cambridge antiquaries as to the priority of the 
 foundation of either. Even if the question 
 could be settled, it would be unimportant. It 
 is sufficient to know that they are closely con- 
 nected with that extraordinary revival of in- 
 tellectual activity which spread from Italy to 
 western Europe during the eleventh and twelfth 
 centuries. We know that there were students 
 gathered in Oxford before the last quarter of 
 the latter century, and that there was an active 
 institution there before fifty years had elapsed 
 from the first notice of Oxford University. 
 
 From the first, the universities found favour 
 with the Pope. From the first the universities 
 found favour with the king. But the king 
 wished to bring all the clergy under the autho- 
 rity of the law, while the Pope wished to 
 maintain that the clergy should be free from 
 every lay tribunal. Both granted the univer-
 
 MIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 1 29 
 
 sities independence, the king from the authority 
 of his own courts, the Pope from the jurisdiction 
 of his own bishops. 
 
 In the struggle between Church and king, 
 which began in the eleventh century, the two 
 powers were naturally anxious to find allies in 
 the new activity which was becoming visible 
 and powerful. The Pope would hope to find 
 the defence of his pretensions in a body which 
 was recruited from the clergy, and which would 
 train the clergy ; the king expected to obtain 
 support from Englishmen on whom he had 
 conferred ample privileges, and who might be 
 expected to prefer independence to deference 
 towards a foreign authority, even though that 
 person might be the pontiff who claimed such 
 rights over princes. 
 
 In the estimate of the various forces which 
 have contributed to the slow development of 
 English liberty, we shall constantly have to 
 recognize the aid which was given by powers 
 whose very existence seemed inimical to liberty, 
 and whose policy appears to be inconsistent 
 with it. The Roman Popes, from the early 
 part of the eleventh to the latter part of the 
 thirteenth centuries, were genuine rulers of man- 
 kind, who aided most materially in the growth 
 of civilization. They were austere, resolute, 
 active men, who were bent on waging war against 
 anarchy and violence. Their weapons were the 
 extraordinary influence they possessed by reason 
 of the reverence in which their office was held,
 
 130 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 its splendour, its antiquity, and its pretensions, 
 and the aid of the new intellectual movement. 
 They could dispense with neither of these 
 forces. If the latter had been arrayed against 
 them, it would have soon disputed the former, 
 as it did in the fourteenth century in England, 
 and in the sixteenth in Germany. If the former 
 had striven without the latter's aid or assistance, 
 it could not, I am persuaded, have held its own 
 against barbarism and anarchy, as it did not 
 hold its own in the ages which immediately 
 preceded the revival of the Pope's authority, 
 during the time which elapsed between the times 
 of Charles the Great and the Norman conquest. 
 The Pope had every reason to be on good 
 terms with these new institutions. 
 
 But the English king was also from the same 
 period the centre and instrument of order. He 
 had to struggle against the turbulence and 
 wilfulness of his nobles, and the dangerous inde- 
 pendence of the clergy, and he sometimes had 
 to use force, sometimes to invoke law, for 
 furthering his ends. It was his interest, also, 
 to seek allies in the men of the new culture, 
 who, though clerks, were bent upon study, and 
 would, out of their own independent action, aid 
 him in the functions of government. He was, 
 therefore, ready enough to support the Pope's 
 will by his own charters, as his successors did, 
 sometimes to the distaste of Parliament, as at 
 the beginning of Henry IV.'s reign, or with its 
 assent, as at the beginning of Edward IV.'s. 
 
 What I have said about these two powers,
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 13! 
 
 and their effect in the university, may be illus- 
 trated from the history and conduct of Bishop 
 Grostete. This personage was the most con- 
 spicuous English churchman in the middle of 
 the thirteenth century. He was the son of a 
 peasant, probably a serf, who had been sent to 
 the university of Oxford, which at that time 
 was without a single college within its borders. 
 Here he was the most distinguished pupil, and 
 the most distinguished teacher of the new learn- 
 ing. When he was, comparatively speaking, 
 an old man, he was appointed Bishop of Lincoln, 
 in whose see Oxford then was situated. He 
 continued his affection to the university in 
 which he had studied and taught. But he 
 thwarted both Pope and king ; the latter, by 
 exercising a vigorous discipline over the ad- 
 mission of clergymen to preferment ; the former, 
 by attempting to extend the episcopal authority 
 over the monastic houses, and by flatly refusing 
 to accept a papal nominee to a benefice in his 
 diocese. It is clear that he learnt this inde- 
 pendence in the university where he had been 
 so long residing. His spirit cost him the 
 honours of saintship, which the English would 
 have conferred on him, but the Pope refused to 
 confirm. 
 
 From the very earliest times the privileges 
 of the universities have been a protection to 
 those who have been identified with innovations 
 in discipline and opinion, either on religious or 
 on secular subjects. This has been especially 
 the case with Oxford, though Cambridge has
 
 132 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 adopted the tenets of her elder sister, and has 
 occasionally taken a more prominent part in 
 their development. 
 
 Historians have noticed that in the very early 
 days of Oxford, the university of Oxford har- 
 boured men whose tenets were entirely distaste- 
 ful to orthodox opinion, and we are told that 
 some of them were expelled and punished 
 shortly after we hear of its existence. Oxford 
 was the place were Wiklif was taught and 
 sheltered. So obstinate was the defence which 
 the university accorded him, that it abandoned 
 him only when its privileges were threatened 
 with extinction, though when the storm was 
 over it harboured and concealed his adherents, 
 to the great disgust of people in authority. It 
 was at Oxford, in the next century, that Pecok, 
 bishop of Chichester, developed those opinions 
 which led to his deprivation. 
 
 At the latter end of the same century (the 
 fifteenth), when the second revival of letters 
 reached England, Erasmus, More, and Colet, 
 the patrons of a restored scholarship, made their 
 first essay on the new lines at Oxford, though 
 it must be admitted that Cambridge rapidly 
 rivalled it in progress. The Reformation was 
 strongest at Cambridge a generation or two 
 later ; but Cambridge had been long familiar 
 with Lollard opinions, the precursors of the 
 reformed doctrine. The movement known as 
 Puritanism began at Oxford, and was taken up 
 warmly at Cambridge. The reaction under 
 Laud began at Oxford, which remained faithful
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 133 
 
 to the tenets encouraged by this prelate, while 
 Cambridge stood on the whole firmly by those 
 which the Long Parliament represented. 
 
 At the beginning of the eighteenth century 
 the most remarkable religious movement of 
 modern times began at Oxford, in the teaching 
 of the brothers Samuel and Charles Wesley and 
 Whitfield. These soon parted, the Wesleys 
 founding a Church which has exercised a pro- 
 digious influence over English-speaking people, 
 and Whitfield having been the reviver of 
 Calvinism. Perhaps no teacher of religious 
 opinion has had a wider field than Wesley had 
 even in his own life, and it is probable that no 
 form of Protestant belief has been so extended 
 as his has been. 
 
 Lastly, in our own days, the so-called Oxford 
 movement has been exhibited, the effects of 
 which have been felt throughout Christendom. 
 Now, I do not criticise any of these revivals, but 
 it is certain that nothing has contributed more 
 to the growth of the British citizen than these 
 periodical developments of religious activity. 
 One cannot conceive society without religion. 
 One cannot interpret it without taking into 
 account the effect which religion has had in 
 giving it shape and colour. Civilized man can 
 no more escape from it than he can escape from 
 consciousness and life, for it is certain that the 
 best energies of mankind have been derived 
 from its authority and precepts.
 
 134 THE BRITISH CITIZEN 
 
 CHAPTER XXII. 
 
 THE WORK OF THE UNIVERSITIES IN REFORMS. 
 
 As the religious temperament of man has been 
 moulded by the action of these centres of thought, 
 so the greatest activity in secular affairs has 
 been the direct result of academical teaching 
 and training ; and perhaps the advancement of 
 mankind in that balance of all just interests 
 which makes up the harmony of society, and 
 which it would be arrogant indeed to say is 
 perfect at present, owes more to the highest 
 education than it does to any other force. 
 Foolish men who call themselves practical often 
 sneer at what they call academic opinion, but 
 wise men who are practical know what is the 
 weight of wise and judicious reasoning. 
 
 It is not easy to discover what was the special 
 influence which able men before the Reformation 
 had on the progress and the making of England. 
 But after that epoch we can distinguish the 
 great names to which this country owes no little 
 of its growth. 1 1 may be useful to point out some 
 of these, and to show what their services were 
 in the domain which they made their own. 
 
 In the first half of the seventeenth century 
 the two most distinguished men are Bacon, who 
 was taught at Cambridge, and Selden, who 
 owed his training to Oxford. I do not speak 
 of either as lawyers and statesmen, but as men
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 135 
 
 who have contributed by their writings to that 
 which makes up the English mind and character. 
 The first of them shook the old system of 
 inquiry to its foundations, and was the first 
 teacher of scientific method. The nature of the 
 second was designated by his motto " Liberty 
 about all things." Selden was the greatest 
 master of legal principles, of the demonstration 
 of the reasonableness of law, as opposed to 
 mere legal forms, in his age, and therefore was 
 the precursor of that system which insists that 
 law should be constantly adapted to the wants 
 of civilized society. 
 
 Amid the trouble and turmoil of the civil war, 
 in which he was himself the agent in some of 
 its bitterest controversies, there was a service 
 which Milton did which was not appreciated in 
 his own age, but bore fruit a generation or two 
 after him. He was the first person who put on 
 a right footing the principles on which the press 
 should be free. He did this service, too, at a 
 time when, in spite of the assistance which he 
 had given to the dominant party, his proposals 
 were offensive and unpopular. Milton was bred 
 at Cambridge, from which university most of 
 our great poets, who have had an academical 
 training have proceeded. 
 
 Towards the end of the same century, when 
 the country was ruled by a singularly depraved 
 government, and seemed likely to fall under a 
 despotism, when a freethinker was advocating 
 that despotism in Church and State, an Oxford 
 thinker and philosopher put out the defence of
 
 I 36 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 toleration. There was no time in which the 
 advocacy of the tenet was more timely, for it 
 seemed as though the rival religions were bent, 
 whoever got the mastery, on extirpating the 
 other. Locke was an Oxford student, and I 
 make no doubt that the comparative gentleness 
 with which the victorious party used its powers 
 at the Revolution was not a little due to the 
 magnanimity which Locke's wise gentleness 
 commended. In this work he was ably seconded 
 by a Cambridge philosopher, the illustrious 
 Newton, who was as wise a public man as he 
 was a profound thinker. 
 
 The most eminent person of the eighteenth 
 century owed his training to Oxford. Adam 
 Smith was a Scotchman, who was educated for 
 nearly seven years at Baliol College. In 
 matters of social and political progress, England 
 owes more, I believe, to this man than to any 
 person who has ever written, for Adam Smith 
 took no part whatever in public life. But he 
 has taught statesmen wisdom from his own day 
 to the present time. Had his teaching been 
 accepted earlier, the American people would 
 probably have still been united to England, for 
 he exposed the system which led to the quarrel. 
 The instruction which he gave, and which 
 taught statesmen that the best interests of their 
 own country lay in the prosperity, and not in 
 the misfortunes, of their neighbours, is part of 
 what may be called the gospel of humanity, for 
 it is the extension of the principles of Christianity 
 to the whole human race, in matters where self-
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 137 
 
 interest seems to be sole guide. There is 
 hardly a position in his great work, " The 
 Wealth of Nations," which has not been at the 
 bottom of every social reform which has been 
 effected from that day to this, and which is not 
 suggestive of reforms that are still to be effected 
 in the future. 
 
 Another distinguished Oxford man, more 
 eminent in his day than Smith was, and born a 
 few years earlier than he, was Samuel Johnson. 
 The service which Johnson did in his own time, 
 and has done from that time onwards, was to 
 teach men the duty of candour and the benefit 
 of common-sense. Now, both these qualities 
 have their inconsistencies, for candour may be 
 sometimes rudeness, and common-sense may be 
 prejudiced. But Johnson was a man of un- 
 affected piety, of genuine sincerity, of unbounded 
 generosity, of substantial justice, of unshaken 
 courage, and of great learning. We know by 
 accident more about him than about any con- 
 siderable person of his age, and he is, and will 
 remain, a household name, and an example for 
 the future as he has been for the past. 
 
 A generation and a half after these men 
 another eminent Oxford man, who through a 
 long life remained a student, came to the front 
 and exercised an influence which has been 
 greatly beneficent. To Jeremy Bentham we 
 owe more in the reform of the English criminal 
 and civil law than to any other Englishman. 
 He wrote, and by his writing set Romilly and 
 Mackintosh to work.
 
 130 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 The criminal law, when he began to denounce 
 it, was, as I have already stated, absolutely 
 atrocious, so atrocious that even juries thought 
 that mercy was a higher duty than obedience to 
 their oath. As the law stood, human life could 
 be taken for trivial offences. There stood a 
 tombstone in my native place, near the chancel 
 door, which stated, and truly stated, that a 
 yeoman had been convicted and hung for some 
 petty matter, and that all the witnesses to the 
 charge had been suborned by some relation, 
 who, if he could get the man out of the way, 
 would succeed to his inheritance. I am almost 
 sorry that the rector of the parish removed the 
 stone, some time after the law, of which the 
 monument made a record, was repealed, because 
 he thought its language would make the people 
 think lightly of the law. 
 
 I have quoted these cases not only as an 
 illustration of the good which the higher educa- 
 tion has done for the people, in the hands of 
 wise and courageous men, who have been more 
 than abreast of their times, and not only to put 
 to silence the silly cavil which vulgar people are 
 fond of uttering about unpractical thinkers, as 
 though one could measure the worth of know- 
 ledge by its immediate acceptance, but to show 
 how men are trained up to do good work for 
 their time and for all time. Of the names I 
 have quoted, Bacon and Bentham were born, 
 the one in the way of uneasy ambition, to which 
 he owed his well-merited disgrace, the other in 
 easy fortune.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 139 
 
 But Selden was the son of a village musician, 
 Milton of a London scrivener, Newton and 
 Locke of no influential stock, Johnson of a 
 travelling bookseller, Smith of a Scotch custom- 
 house officer. The best and the most unstained 
 of them owed nothing to birth, much to their 
 training, most to the unfailing energy of their 
 character. 
 
 I could, indeed, speak of many more to whom 
 these benefits of an academical training did not 
 come. There is the common property of English 
 civilization, Shakespeare ; the common inherit- 
 ance of English religion, Bunyan. These are 
 but types of the cloud of witnesses. But it is 
 certain, too, that no good work ever dies, and 
 that we English people owe our present growth 
 and life to a host of ancestors, whose pedigree is 
 not traced or traceable, but of whose blood we 
 are. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIII. 
 
 THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE. 
 
 THE higher education in England has been con- 
 tinued regularly, but with great depressions as 
 well as exaltations for seven centuries at our 
 universities. The depressions were during the 
 troubles of the fifteenth century, at the epoch of 
 the Reformation, and during the general dead- 
 ness of the eighteenth century. It cannot be 
 denied, and it ought not to be concealed, that
 
 I4O THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 whatever may have been the ultimate benefits 
 of the Reformation, and the benefits were great, 
 its early stages, mainly in consequence of the 
 badness of those who were its instruments, very 
 nearly brought about the ruin of the nation. 
 
 The Scotch Reformation busied itself early 
 with the education of the people. Coeval or 
 almost coeval with the new system of eccle- 
 siastical government in Scotland was the parish 
 school, which, though associated with what 
 became ultimately the national Church of the 
 Scottish people, was independent in its existence 
 and always aimed at a high standard of teaching. 
 It is difficult to overrate the benefits which this 
 system has conferred on the inhabitants of the 
 Northern Kingdom. It has made the poorest 
 state in Europe one of the most vigorous, enter- 
 prising, and opulent. 
 
 The English Reformation, unfortunately, did 
 not plant schools in any parish, and did not 
 therefore do anything for the education of the 
 working classes. There was an intention on 
 the part of the government, as I have said 
 already, that the grantees of the abbey lands 
 should devote a part of that which they received 
 to the endowment of schools. But this scheme 
 was very imperfectly carried out. The actual 
 endowment is that which forms the fund from 
 which the so-called English public schools were 
 founded. But the quantity from the beginning 
 was far short of what was requisite for a system 
 of national education, and very speedily the 
 foundations were appropriated by very different
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 141 
 
 persons from those for whom they were originally 
 designed. 
 
 As I have already stated, there is good reason 
 to believe that before the Reformation, what we 
 call primary education was much more widely 
 afforded than people think, and there is equally 
 good reason to believe that after the Reforma- 
 tion the quality and the amount of this education 
 greatly deteriorated. It is pretty certain that it 
 became worse instead of better as time went on ; 
 though for an interval, and principally at the 
 epoch of the Protectorate, there was a consider- 
 able amount of activity in the direction of educa- 
 tion. I draw my inference from the bills sent 
 in by workmen and artificers, thousands of which 
 I have inspected, at various periods of English 
 history. 
 
 During the eighteenth century, the education 
 of the masses was as scanty as it was in the 
 darkest ages. I do not believe that a hundred 
 years ago, more than one man in ten, or one 
 woman in twenty, knew how to read and write. 
 Even when they could read the Bible and sign 
 their names, they read with difficulty. When I 
 was a youth in a Hampshire village where a 
 school had indeed been started by the rector, 
 now sixty years ago, though in many neighbour- 
 ing parishes there was no school, not even a 
 dame's school hardly one of the peasantry who 
 was over forty years of age, knew how to read. 
 It was deemed superfluous to give a rudimentary 
 education to the peasant, perhaps even incon- 
 venient.
 
 142 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 The movement in education began with the 
 Sunday-school, and it is not easy to determine 
 whether the clergy of the Established Church, 
 where they had the inclination to carry out such 
 a purpose, or the ministers of the nonconforming 
 bodies when they undertook this duty, are to be 
 credited with the earliest efforts in this direction. 
 It is certain, however, that the duty was per- 
 formed very irregularly and only in special 
 localities. In course of time, however, this work 
 of individuals was developed into associated 
 work, and active societies were formed by the 
 Church and the Nonconformists almost simul- 
 taneously, whose object was that education 
 should be accompanied by religious teaching. 
 Later on State grants, at first very small, were 
 made in aid of schools which satisfied the 
 obligations imposed by the government as con- 
 ditions of that assistance, and a body of inspectors 
 were appointed, whose duty it was to report on 
 the progress of the school, its scheme of instruc- 
 tion, its discipline, the attendance of the scholars, 
 and the results of the teaching. 
 
 It is, however, only fifteen years ago, i.e. in 
 1870, that the machinery of education was sup- 
 plied to all children, and its acceptance made 
 compulsory. From this time it has become part 
 of the settled policy of this country, that all 
 young people should be educated, and the cost 
 defrayed partly at the public charge, partly by 
 voluntary effort, partly by the payments of 
 parents, partly by grants from the Exchequer. 
 The first two of these resources is a matter of
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 143 
 
 choice. If a locality supplies the requisite funds 
 from subscriptions, the last two sources of income 
 supply what is lacking. If the locality cannot or 
 will not, the initial charges are met by a rate. 
 
 The motive which led the State slowly and 
 perhaps reluctantly to undertake the duty of 
 insisting on the education of all, was primarily, 
 and I think justly, an economical one. It was 
 seen that primary education was a means by 
 which other knowledge was imparted more 
 easily and more early. Take the simple case 
 of a soldier learning his drill. It was found that 
 a recruit who had obtained the benefits of 
 education learnt this in half the time, and there- 
 fore reached efficiency at half the cost needed 
 for training one who was without the education, 
 and it was reasonably inferred that what applied 
 to one craft, would apply to all, and that conse- 
 quently education meant a saving of time. 
 
 Again, it was observed that in the struggle 
 between nations, other things being equal, the 
 best-educated people would be successful rivals 
 of those who were not so well grounded. Now, 
 within any community, the strife of competition 
 is greatly modified by custom, and by a disposi- 
 tion which most people have, and public opinion 
 commends, of not taking extreme advantage of 
 the position which may have been secured. But 
 in international trade competition is strict and 
 absolute, and success or failure depends entirely 
 on the general effectiveness of industry. Under 
 these circumstances, countries which, being 
 densely peopled, depend largely on their foreign
 
 144 TH E BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 trade for the employment of the people, and 
 indeed for the maintenance of the people, have 
 the highest possible interest in aiding everything 
 which should make labour as effective as possible, 
 and therefore more apt for the struggle of life, 
 and success in the rivalry with other nations. 
 
 Certain parts of Germany, especially its 
 northern territories, and the United States, had 
 recognized the wisdom of insisting on a national 
 system of education before the English people 
 had, and in the latter country especially, the 
 establishment of a school is the earliest public 
 duty which a new settlement or town undertakes. 
 There is, indeed, no compulsion in the United 
 States, for no one needs it. The benefits of 
 education are so universally recognized, that all 
 parents send their children to school as a matter 
 of course. 
 
 Again, it is felt that education is a great check 
 to criminal propensities. It does not follow that 
 the knowledge itself supplies the check, it may 
 even, as we have too good reason to know, 
 supply the means for more daring or more subtle 
 wickedness, and it is not by any means im- 
 probable that the spread of education has sug- 
 gested fraud in place of violence, cunning in 
 place of daring. Besides, the statistics of crime 
 begin with committals and conclude with con- 
 victions. They do not include undiscovered 
 offences, and it is plain that the shrewder and 
 more intelligent an evil-doer becomes, the more 
 does he evade the risk of detection. 
 
 But the advantage of education, great though
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 145 
 
 the value may be of what is taught, chiefly 
 depends on the mode in which the teaching is 
 imparted. The essence of school teaching is 
 discipline, and the discipline must be intelligent, 
 not arbitrary, i.e. it is that which the person who 
 is subjected to it sees gradually to be necessary 
 and wise. Now, this discipline is twofold. It 
 implies reasonable obedience to the teacher, and 
 reciprocal good feeling and fairness among the 
 pupils. Children learn that self-will, rudeness, 
 violence, falsehood, evil speaking, are mis- 
 chievous vices, and to learn that a vice, to which 
 human nature may be prone, brings evil and 
 suffering in its train to the child who yields to 
 it, as well as to those who suffer from it, is a 
 training of incalculable value. Nor does the 
 rivalry and emulation among the scholars bring 
 about bad feeling. Children, and for the matter 
 of that young men, are generally very just to 
 one another, and are free from many of those 
 selfish vices which a more advanced age develops 
 among the struggles of later life. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIV. 
 
 EDUCATIONAL BRIDGES. 
 
 I HAVE dealt with the process by which the more 
 intelligent and well-to-do persons are trained in 
 England, up to the duties and privileges of our 
 citizenship, and how those who never get beyond 
 the labours which must remain the business of
 
 146 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 most among us, have at last, and none too soon, 
 obtained their training. I do not disparage, I 
 repeat, the value of what they learn, but incom- 
 parably more important is the process by which 
 they learn. The experience of a well-ordered 
 and well-conducted school, in which the master 
 is wise and the pupils are rationally dutiful, is 
 the best part of all education, and is of in- 
 calculable value. If young people behave well, 
 they are pretty sure to learn well. 
 
 But there is something else which has to be 
 done, something which was lost in the great 
 confusion which followed on the Reformation. 
 Before this time it was common for persons of 
 very humble, of even what was called low con- 
 dition, to rise to places of authority, trust, and 
 dignity. The theory of the law was that half 
 the working population should be condemned 
 to a perpetual disability. The fact was that 
 these persons frequently got over what were 
 supposed to be insurmountable barriers, and 
 became among the most eminent persons of 
 their age. I have already pointed out how the 
 university, the monastery, and the Church were 
 agents in this result. 
 
 It is plain that if there be a personal right at 
 all, it is the right that an individual should be 
 able by honest and innocent efforts to better 
 himself. Men are of value by reason of the 
 service which they do to their fellow-men, and 
 if hindrances are put on an individual who would 
 or could do a service, he is wronged, and society 
 is wronged too, for it has to put up with inferior
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 147 
 
 services when it might perhaps have had superior 
 ones. Men of all ranks of life have done good 
 to their fellow-men, and character and capacity 
 are not the privilege of any station. It is clear, 
 then, that as these gifts, or graces, or powers 
 may be discoverable in all conditions of men, 
 all men should have an open career, if they have 
 the courage, the skill, and the constancy to take 
 advantage of it. 
 
 It is often said that genius will surmount all 
 obstacles. The most wonderful English genius 
 was the son of a poor burgher in a country town, 
 who left his home to follow the despised and 
 degraded calling of a player. The genius of 
 whom our Scotch kindred are justly proud, was 
 the son of a small farmer, whose position in life 
 was hardly higher than that of an English farm 
 labourer. Instances of this kind might be 
 multiplied. But we never can tell what the 
 world has lost by the difficulties which have 
 denied the abilities of others a fair career. I 
 do not say that there could have been a dozen 
 Englishmen like Shakespeare, and a dozen 
 Scotchmen like Burns, but we never can tell 
 whether there might not have been more than 
 one if the chance had been given. 
 
 Besides, genius is one thing and usefulness is 
 another. It is true that the highest usefulness 
 is found in well-directed genius, but there are 
 many forms of supreme usefulness which one 
 could never call genius, and there may be many 
 men who could do the work which has to be 
 done, better than those into whose hands it
 
 148 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 happens to be entrusted. At any rate, such 
 persons should have every opportunity of show- 
 ing and proving their ability. 
 
 In the competition of life, all of us who have 
 any experience of men, though their acquaint- 
 ance with such matters may be narrow, can 
 point out people who have raised themselves 
 from humble position to wealth and rank. There 
 is a work written by Mr. Smiles, the object of 
 which is to point out how such persons have 
 lived and risen. Self-help, however, though a 
 just end of life, is by no means the highest end ; 
 and perhaps a trifle too much has been said and 
 written about those who get wealth. That man 
 has done best by the generation in which he 
 lives, who has left his mark on his generation 
 by the good which he has done. And what is 
 true of men as individuals is true of institutions. 
 
 Now the problem has been : How can a 
 youth of capacity, diligence and character, rise 
 by the machinery of the highest education from 
 the poorest to the best prospects ? The road 
 has never been closed in the ordinary business 
 of life, but a quarter of a century ago there was 
 no opportunity given for a lad such as I have 
 described to rise from the national school to the 
 university, and thence into any walk of life for 
 which his abilities fitted him. At present, the 
 path is fairly open, and I am glad to say that 
 many such persons have been discovered and 
 helped on, as they were helped on in old times, 
 though by a different process. 
 
 About thirty years ago, the legislature made
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 149 
 
 great changes in the constitution of the univer- 
 sities and the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. 
 Limitations of their endowments to particular 
 localities, schools, and families, were in general 
 swept away, and the endowments were thrown 
 open to all persons, under certain conditions of 
 proficiency, and for a time of conformity. This 
 change gave a strong stimulus to the endowed 
 schools, for while the preferences which existed 
 to most of these schools were greatly modified, 
 such schools as were not specially favoured came 
 into the competition, and, when they were in 
 energetic hands, became well known from being 
 obscure and frequently useless. 
 
 At this period the University of Oxford 
 stepped in by its own action. It offered to 
 examine schools, and especially those schools in 
 which the middle classes were taught schools 
 at that time at a very low condition of efficiency. 
 Oxford was soon followed by Cambridge, and a 
 very efficient system of examination was estab- 
 lished. Many grammar schools adopted the 
 scheme, especially those which, having been 
 neglected or mismanaged, were now emulous 
 after a higher reputation. In course of time, 
 some of the Oxford colleges offered the most 
 
 o 
 
 successful boys in the senior examination ad- 
 vantages or aids to their higher education, and 
 I well remember that one of the first of these 
 aids was given at a distinguished Oxford college 
 to the son of a poor widow, a laundress in South 
 London, and that the young man amply justified 
 the help given him.
 
 1 50 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 But the constitution of the old endowed schools 
 was very defective. They were cramped by 
 regulations made at a time when the future 
 could not be foreseen, and the machinery by 
 which these constitutions could be changed was 
 dilatory and costly. It was therefore determined 
 by Parliament that a commission should be 
 created for the purpose of giving facilities for 
 such salutary changes as would make the schools 
 more efficient, and in some cases should aid them 
 by adding obsolete charities to the school en- 
 dowment. In this manner, many schools were 
 remodelled, and many are even now being re- 
 modelled. The result has been that intermediate 
 education has been greatly improved, and in 
 general, care has been taken that these newly 
 constituted foundations should, on one side of 
 the school at least, be conformed to the more 
 modern wants of the time in which we live, and 
 the exigencies of business. No one, but those 
 who have had experience of what ruled in past 
 time, could form any conception as to the im- 
 portance of the change which has been effected. 
 
 Then came the General Education Act. The 
 last action of the government in remodelling 
 schools, is to introduce a system under which 
 aids are given to boys from primary schools 
 towards their higher education in grammar 
 schools. The scheme is new, imperfect, and 
 not always judicious. But there are many parts 
 of the country in which the machinery is pro- 
 vided by which a boy of the very humblest 
 origin can gradually move upwards to the highest
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 151 
 
 education, and it is to be hoped that more will 
 be done in the same direction. 
 
 These ancient endowments were intended for 
 all classes, for the poor most of all ; not because 
 they were poor, but because they were deserving. 
 The process which gives every one a fair and 
 free field for his abilities, is just and fair. No 
 career should be closed to the deserving, and 
 hereafter the way to such a career may be made 
 more open. It does not follow that it will be 
 easy, for the path is not open to a man because 
 he is of poor parents or humble origin, but 
 because he is competent. Education is the 
 right of all, the highest education of all who can 
 attain to it. 
 
 CHAPTER XXV. 
 
 THE PRESS. 
 
 ABOUT the middle of the fifteenth century, a 
 discovery was made in an ancient city on the 
 Rhine, the Church of which had been founded 
 by an Englishman some eight centuries before. 
 This discovery had not been made by the 
 ancients, and perhaps would not have been 
 made at the time, had it not been for another 
 invention, made more than a century earlier. 
 The first in order of time was the invention of 
 paper, the second was that of printing with 
 movable types. 
 
 For twenty or thirty years before printing
 
 152 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 was invented, as we now know it, something 
 like it had been practised. Blocks of wood had 
 been engraved with rude drawings and writings, 
 and these block books as they are called, are 
 still in existence in public libraries. But the 
 peculiarity of the new system was, that the types 
 were movable. We do not know what was the 
 first book which was printed with movable 
 types, but the first book with a date is a splendid 
 bible in three volumes, copies of which are 
 sometimes sold, one a few months ago, for an 
 enormous sum. It is as beautiful a specimen 
 of the printer's skill as anything which is printed 
 now. Naturally, it was made to imitate a 
 manuscript, and so wonderful was the new art, 
 that the inventors of it were supposed to have 
 produced their books by magic. 
 
 For a long time the new art, when its real 
 process was discovered, was hailed as a general 
 benefit. The most valuable books, ancient and 
 modern, were printed at a price far below that 
 at which they could be obtained in manuscript, 
 and printing presses were set up everywhere. 
 The ancient monasteries busied themselves 
 with it, and enterprising men of business set 
 themselves actively to work in order to satisfy 
 the growing demand for books. 
 
 After men had become familiar with this new 
 instrument of learning, the great event of the 
 sixteenth century, the Reformation, occurred, 
 and a revolt was made against the authority of 
 the Roman Church. The printing press was 
 an essential service to this movement, so great
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 153 
 
 a service that it does not appear how the new 
 doctrine could have spread or been made acces- 
 sible without it. The Reformation was not 
 conducted in a very courteous manner, and the 
 authority which was assailed was also insulted. 
 The innovations of the new teachers were dis- 
 pleasing enough, but the warfare was carried on in 
 the plainest, rudest, and most offensive manner. 
 
 Now, from very early times, though not from 
 the earliest, the Church had taken upon itself 
 the function of controlling opinion. The old 
 Church encouraged intellectual activity. It was 
 the steady patron of learning ; but it demanded 
 that learning should be submissive to authority, 
 should aid it, not thwart it. It punished those 
 who employed their abilities in criticising it in 
 an adverse or unfriendly spirit. The history of 
 the Christian Church is full of instances of men 
 who were, in the early part of their career, the 
 favourites of those who exercised ecclesiastical 
 authority, but who after a time became the 
 objects of its anger, who were persecuted and 
 punished. It was natural that authority should 
 resent what it thought was an abuse of the new 
 engine of knowledge, and should take any step 
 which it deemed necessary or convenient in 
 order to bring this instrument under control. 
 
 But it was not the authority only of the heads 
 of religion which was slighted, or criticised, or 
 lampooned. The ferment and turmoil of the 
 age turned men to the function of criticising the 
 acts of kings and governments. For a long 
 time, indeed, it was not easy to separate affairs
 
 154 TIIE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 of religion from affairs of State; for the party 
 of reformers always strove to get the upper 
 hand in the State for that which they conceived 
 to be right, and therefore the highest duty 
 which government could carry out. 
 
 About a century after the Reformation began, 
 the press was employed for the discussion of 
 what may be called secular subjects the prin- 
 ciples of government and law, the rights of 
 prince and people. In one sense the thirty 
 years' war, which desolated Germany, was a 
 religious war, just as the revolt of the Nether- 
 lands had been a generation or two before. In 
 another sense it was a political war, in which 
 the authority of the temporal ruler was chal- 
 lenged. Similarly, our great war between king 
 and Parliament was at once a religious and a 
 secular war. This war was carried on not only 
 with armies, but with the weapons of literary 
 controversy. 
 
 The hardest and the last lesson which a 
 government learns, is that of bearing criticism 
 on its conduct. The higher it rates its autho- 
 rity, the more impatient it is of any cavilling at 
 its doings. The Parliament professed to be 
 struggling for liberty, but when it got the 
 mastery, it was as eager to punish its critics as 
 that government had been which it conquered 
 and superseded. It was to correct this spirit 
 that Milton wrote the most famous of his prose 
 works that which claimed the liberty of the 
 press. 
 
 The process by which the government
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 155 
 
 checked the liberty of the press was by subject- 
 ing all books to the inspection of a licenser, 
 whose permission was necessary for the publica- 
 tion of the volume. But it is quite certain that 
 the precaution was ineffectual, that many un- 
 licensed pamphlets were printed secretly, and 
 disseminated secretly, for such pamphlets without 
 the licence of the authority are found by 
 hundreds, during the continuance of the censor- 
 ship, in public libraries. 
 
 At last, mainly owing to the utter incom- 
 petence of the persons who were appointed to 
 the office, the function of licenser was abolished, 
 nearly at the end of the seventeenth century. 
 It seemed to be a dangerous experiment to 
 allow the freedom, for parties were very bitter, 
 the settlement of the government seemed any- 
 thing but secure, and the press kept issuing the 
 grossest libels and lampoons. But in general 
 these violent writers did no harm to that which 
 they assailed, and were of no service to that 
 which they defended. 
 
 In one direction, however, the freedom of the 
 press was not allowed. It remained for a long 
 time, for nearly a century, a very grievous 
 offence for any person to print in pamphlet, 
 magazine, or newspaper, any account of what 
 was said or done in either House of Parliament ; 
 and printers were imprisoned and otherwise 
 punished for contravening by such publications, 
 what were conceived to be the privileges of 
 Parliament. 
 
 There had once been a reason for this.
 
 156 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 When the struggle was going on between the 
 king and his advisers on the one hand, and the 
 members of Parliament, especially those of the 
 House of Commons, on the other, any informa- 
 tion given as to the speech or vote of indi- 
 viduals, might be and often had been dangerous 
 to them. Elizabeth frequently imprisoned 
 members who had given her offence, as had 
 also her two immediate successors. It was 
 natural, therefore, that Parliament should cherish 
 the secrecy of its proceedings, as long as the 
 safety of the individual was compromised by 
 the openness of his speech. 
 
 As soon, however, as the members of the 
 Houses of Parliament were allowed complete 
 liberty of debate, subject to rules of decency and 
 order, the motive for this secrecy passed away, 
 and the privilege became mischievous, as the 
 public had no means of knowing whether its 
 representatives kept faith with them by speech 
 or vote. It has been pointed out that much of 
 the corruption justly charged on members of both 
 Houses during the eighteenth century, and 
 indeed before it, from the Restoration onwards, 
 was fostered and hidden by this practice. 
 
 Macaulay says that the abolition of the 
 censorship was mainly brought about by the 
 intrigues of a thoroughly bad man. The liberty 
 of the press in relation to parliamentary report- 
 ing was certainly secured by one of the worst 
 men of the eighteenth century, Wilkes, who suc- 
 cessfully defied the House of Commons when they 
 strove to arrest the printers of their debates.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 157 
 
 But from this time the proceedings of Parlia- 
 ment are open. The report of what is said 
 there, and the manner in which members vote, 
 is freely published, and in so far as the press is 
 an engine of political education, it is allowed to 
 comment at discretion on the doings and sayings 
 of those public men to whom debate in Parlia- 
 ment and the administration of public affairs is 
 entrusted. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVI. 
 
 THE ACTION OF THE CLERGY. 
 
 IN his account of what constitutes the wealth of 
 nations, and of the various powers which unite 
 society together, Adam Smith makes use of a 
 singular expression about the Church, i.e. the 
 clergy, when he ranges the endowments of the 
 clergy under those of such revenues as are 
 devoted to the promotion of education. He 
 describes the clergy as engaged in the education 
 of persons of all ages. He was of course re- 
 ferring to the ministrations of the clergy in his 
 own day ; but it would be an imperfect sketch 
 of the history of progress, and the means by 
 which the British citizen has been developed, if 
 we omitted to notice the part which the clergy 
 have played in the making of our people. 
 
 It has been justly remarked that in all 
 countries which have a true government, or a 
 true constitution, and a place in the general
 
 158 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 growth of civilization, there always will be two 
 parties. These have been called the party of 
 progress and the party of order. There are 
 times in which the maintenance of order is so 
 important, that every valuable social force is 
 enlisted on its side ; there are occasions in which 
 progress has been so imperatively urgent, that 
 the most settled friends of order are as eager 
 for it as the most vehement advocates of 
 change are. 
 
 Now, in the early history of our race and its 
 civilization, that function in defence of the order 
 of society which the clergy fulfilled was of such 
 supreme value that it is not easy to understand 
 how, had it not possessed activity and authority, 
 society could have emerged from barbarism. 
 The early settlers in England were not, indeed, 
 fierce and untamed savages. They were inferior 
 in civilization to part of that which they super- 
 seded, the relics of the Roman system ; they 
 were superior to part of it, the uncivilized and 
 expelled natives. I have described the society 
 which they formed, its close local ties, its feeble 
 central authority at the best, the incessant wars 
 which were waged between the tribal settlers, 
 and the imperfect submission to which the most 
 vigorous and capable of their kings reduced the 
 settlers. 
 
 In course of time they accepted Christianity, 
 far earlier at the extremities of the island than 
 in its centre. The south and east were Chris- 
 tianized generations before the midland counties 
 were, and yet at various periods south and east
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 159 
 
 were overrun by savage pagans, who extirpated, 
 as far as they could, religion from its earliest 
 seats. 
 
 Now, Ireland was converted to Christianity 
 at a far earlier date than England was, and it 
 appears that much of Scotland, even in its 
 northern and western parts, was brought under 
 this influence. But for many a long day after 
 order and government had been established in 
 England and southern Scotland, these older 
 seats of Christianity remained a mere chaos, in 
 which there never was peace, much less order. 
 
 The cause of the difference is, I think, plainly 
 to be referred to the fact that the Church of the 
 period which preceded the Conquest and followed 
 it for five centuries was an offshoot of the 
 Roman Church, was in close communion and 
 relation with it, was strong as the Roman 
 Church was strong, and weak as that central 
 power was weak. The worst condition of the 
 English Church before the Conquest was in the 
 century which preceded that event. But this 
 was also one of the worst epochs of the Roman 
 Church. The best age of the unreformed 
 Church of England from that even to the Refor- 
 mation was in the twelfth and thirteenth cen- 
 turies, when that Church was in its greatest 
 vigour, the worst was in the fifteenth, when the 
 Church of Rome was scandalously corrupt. 
 
 It would take far too much space to point out 
 how useful the authority of the papacy was in 
 the history of civilization. Secular authority in 
 the greater part of the western world was
 
 l6o THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 barbarous, violent, and destructive. If there 
 had been no power of which it stood in awe, 
 there is and could be no reason why the new 
 inhabitants of western Europe should have 
 made a single step from the condition in which 
 they were when they emerged from the wild 
 forests and plains of the east, and occupied the 
 seats of ancient civilization. But they en- 
 countered here a force, with which they treated 
 at first, with which they next associated them- 
 selves, to which in various degrees they finally 
 submitted. The submission or deference of 
 those potentates was the first step to genuine 
 progress, and, however it may be criticised now, 
 was a necessary step. 
 
 When modern historians write about the sub- 
 mission of Henry to Gregory in the eleventh 
 century, or about the persistent animosity of the 
 Popes to the House of Swabia in the next two 
 centuries, and of the base submission of our king 
 John to the legate of Innocent, they criticise 
 those events in the spirit of the Reformation. 
 But I am pretty sure that at the time in which 
 those events occurred, every one who could 
 interpret what was essential to order and 
 government, would have been more disposed 
 to side with the Pope than with the king. When 
 the influence of this central authority was held 
 to be mischievous or superfluous, it was repu- 
 diated ; but I am convinced that all acquiescence 
 in authority is due, when such acquiescence is 
 voluntary, to the assurance that it is useful or 
 beneficent.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. l6l 
 
 It is due to the Church of the Middle Ages, 
 that we have the relics of ancient literature pre- 
 served to us, that there was a refuge from 
 oppression, a check to tyranny, and an energetic 
 criticism on misgovernment. The people used 
 the authority of the Pope against the king, the 
 king used the same authority against a turbulent 
 aristocracy. In time, to be sure, both monarch 
 and people outgrew the necessity of this aid, 
 but for a time it was of supreme value. Of 
 course I do not say that the influence was never 
 abused. But it was, as I read history, less 
 abused than any other political force. 
 
 The Roman Church desired that men should 
 be educated and be at peace. But every autho- 
 rity takes care to protect itself, and naturally, if 
 its authority is disputed or shaken, it will sacrifice 
 the ends which it proposes in order to secure 
 the main end of its own action, its own power. 
 It desired that men should be taught, but that 
 they should be taught only on its own terms. 
 It encouraged mental activity, but it soon re- 
 quired mental submission. It purposed to 
 encourage that which it thought itself at last 
 constrained to persecute. 
 
 That which I have said is illustrated by the 
 attitude which two of the best-known prelates 
 of the pre- Reformation period took at critical 
 times in English history. 
 
 Becketwas the friend and favourite of Henry 
 II. He had been most useful to him in the 
 early reforms of his reign, reforms urgent beyond 
 measure, and requiring a strong hand and watch- 
 
 M
 
 1 62 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 ful eye. By his help the kingdom was settled, 
 and the royal house firmly seated on the throne. 
 Now, as the king had subdued the rebellious 
 nobles, he resolved on bringing the Church under 
 discipline, and thought that Becket, who was 
 still a layman, would be the best instrument for 
 this end. Becket saw the facts more clearly than 
 his master did, and told him that if he were 
 made archbishop, he would be forced to resist 
 him, and that their friendship would be at an 
 end. The king insisted on his compliance, and 
 the sequel of the events is known to all who 
 read English history. The Pope was in exile, 
 was resisted by an anti-pope, and threatened by 
 the emperor. But he was too strong for the 
 powerful king of England, as Becket foresaw. 
 
 On the other hand, less than fifty years 
 afterwards, the most powerful Pope in history 
 quarrelled with our king John. He forced the 
 king to accept an archbishop in Langton, and 
 ultimately to surrender his crown. The Pope, 
 undoubtedly, calculated that Langton would be 
 his willing agent. But this archbishop was the 
 principal means by which John was forced to 
 sign the Great Charter, and to give guarantees 
 of good government. When the Pope released 
 him from his obligations, Langton held him to 
 them, and finally got the better of both Pope 
 and king. The times had changed, and English- 
 men had begun to learn how to conduct their 
 own affairs, rudely and roughly I allow, without 
 that foreign interference which had been 
 necessary.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 163 
 
 The political power of the Pope in England 
 was practically at an end at the conclusion of 
 the thirteenth century. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII. 
 
 THE GROWTH OF TOLERATION. 
 
 THERE always was what we should call a national 
 Church in England, i.e. a Church which taught 
 that the first business of the subject was to be 
 an Englishman. The men who represented the 
 feeling are found in very unexpected quarters. 
 In the circumstances which preceded the quarrel 
 with Becket, nearly the whole of the bishops 
 sided with the king, in what were supposed to 
 be English interests. In John's reign, the most 
 English of the bishops, as I have said, was the 
 Pope's nominee, Langton. In the reign of 
 John's son, the great Grostete was intensely 
 English in his sympathies, and if in the next 
 century the clergy quarrelled with Wiklif, it was 
 not because he denounced the authority of the 
 Pope, but because he disparaged the Pope's 
 doctrine, a system which they were not as yet 
 prepared to dispute. 
 
 When the Reformation came, and the people, 
 except during a short reaction during Mary's 
 reign, finally broke with Rome, the most strenu- 
 ous opponents of that short reaction were 
 Gardiner and Bonner, both men who are set 
 down as cruel persecutors, while the far more
 
 1 64 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 gentle Pole was actively anxious to restore all 
 those relations which had been interrupted by 
 Henry. 
 
 After the Reformation the clergy of the 
 Established Church (practically all the clergy, 
 with the exception of a few who still adhered to 
 the old faith, and some sectaries as yet by no 
 means numerous) generally adhered to high 
 views of the royal prerogative and were ready 
 to support, though with different theological 
 views, the government of Elizabeth, and the 
 government of the Stuarts. They and their 
 opponents, the Puritans, were equally anxious 
 to model the Church and control the people to 
 their own ends. The advocate of Whitgift's 
 system, and the advocate of Cartwright's system, 
 would have made no terms with his opponent, 
 but would have forced him to submit if he could 
 have had his way. Both sides were eager for 
 uniformity. 
 
 Toleration, in the best sense, i.e. a genuine 
 conviction that truth and justice are not served 
 by the violent repression of opinion adverse 
 to our own, even though we accept our own 
 opinion with sincere conviction, is the last and 
 the hardest lesson which civilized man learns. 
 There may be and there has been in times long 
 past, the toleration of contempt. The man who 
 disbelieves everything which others believe, may 
 affect, and has often affected, a negligent pity for 
 those whose convictions he repudiates. This 
 was the toleration expressed by sceptical philo- 
 sophers towards Christianity in its earlier days.
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 165 
 
 But genuine toleration, which looks on a different 
 judgment from its own with consideration, is a 
 late growth and a rare growth, though it has 
 made much progress in our own day. 
 
 Two or three centuries ago, it could not be 
 accepted. Men had been educated into be- 
 lieving not merely that false opinion, as they 
 held it, was injurious to the man and dishonour- 
 ing to God, but that it ought to be extirpated, 
 if not by severe punishment, still with permanent 
 disability. When the principles of the Refor- 
 mation were in the ascendant, the adherents of 
 the old religion were extirpated relentlessly, as 
 in Sweden. When the government adhered to 
 the old faith, the same measure was dealt out to 
 the Protestant. It is said that a large majority 
 of the people in Austria were Lutherans or 
 Calvinists at the beginning of the Thirty Years' 
 War, and that these opinions were nearly extinct 
 at the end of that period. Great part of the 
 south and west of France was Protestant at the 
 end of the sixteenth century, and hardly a frac- 
 tion was left at the end of the seventeenth. In 
 Scotland at one time the Episcopal party per- 
 secuted the Presbyterians, and a generation after 
 the Presbyterians rabbled the Episcopalian 
 clergy. 
 
 The principle of Toleration was first intro- 
 duced into the English statute-book, immediately 
 after the Revolution, in a halting and imperfect 
 way, but with purposes more liberal than the 
 words of the statute implied. It had become 
 necessary as well as just to be tolerant. A
 
 1 66 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 generation before, the dominant sects had per- 
 secuted the Episcopal clergy, had ousted them 
 from their livings, had suppressed their system 
 of government. When retaliation was possible 
 it was also natural, and the restored Church 
 dealt harshly with the sectaries. Had the 
 Church at the revolution thrown in its lot with 
 the Stuarts, the same process would in all likeli- 
 hood have been revived when James was forced 
 to abdicate. 
 
 But for a time at least the clergy of the 
 Established Church had made common cause 
 against the king's policy and government with 
 the other malcontents. They had been harshly 
 treated, and the Nonconformists had accorded 
 them their active sympathy. At the stand 
 made against the Declaration of Indulgence, the 
 Dissenters had refused to go with the king. 
 When the trial of the seven bishops took place, 
 the Nonconformists were as eager for their 
 defence as Churchmen were, and were as 
 thankful for their deliverance. After so strong 
 an evidence of common feeling, it was impos- 
 sible to perpetuate a mutual enmity. 
 
 From that time onward the progress of tolera- 
 tion has been gradual but steady. It was not 
 easy, to be sure, after the offence had been 
 given, to show the same generosity to the 
 adherents of the unreformed faith, and more 
 than a century and a quarter elapsed before 
 our Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen were 
 admitted to equal rights with the rest of 
 the English people. But even the Noncon-
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 167 
 
 formist was put under disabilities for the same 
 period. 
 
 It cannot, I think, be said that religious zeal 
 and sincere conviction, as manifested in its 
 best way, have been weakened by the accept- 
 ance of the principles of toleration. Since the 
 Reformation the most intolerant age was that of 
 Charles II. It was certainly the most immoral, 
 one in which outward conformity was coupled 
 with shameless vice and hardly concealed scep- 
 ticism. 
 
 But it is not in religious opinion only that the 
 principle of toleration has had so humanizing an 
 educational value. It has been extended to 
 other forms of opinion. There is as much 
 division among Englishmen on political topics 
 as there ever has been on religious grounds. 
 Men feel warmly, sometimes even angrily, on 
 public questions, speak strongly and work 
 vigorously. But the bitterness of political faction 
 has passed away. We cannot hear the prayer 
 which is appended to the service for the day of 
 the accession of the sovereign with the same 
 feeling which they must have had who penned 
 it. We are all, the warmest among us, ready 
 to admit that provided a public man has a just 
 and honest English interest before him, we 
 should credit him with fairness and listen to 
 him with patience. If we take up a newspaper 
 of forty years ago, we shall be amazed at the 
 coarseness and virulence with which rivals spoke 
 and wrote of each other. Another generation 
 back and it was worse still. The worst motives
 
 1 68 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 were ascribed to men in the pamphlets of the 
 day, at the very time when the liberty of the 
 press was conceded. 
 
 The same comparative gentleness is shown 
 in the ordinary business of life. I can remember 
 the time when the farmers made almost open 
 war on the clergy. 1 1 is not so long since that 
 trade disputes were settled, or rather embittered, 
 by atrocious violence and outrage. I can quite 
 understand the heat with which working-men 
 used to look on what threatened them not with 
 loss only, but imperilled their livelihood. But 
 the conduct which was common a generation 
 ago is rare now, and is discredited. Disputes, 
 often lamentable, often disastrous in their results, 
 are carried on with a patience and a temper 
 which would not long ago have seemed un- 
 naturally tame. 
 
 This, too, has been accompanied by a tender- 
 ness towards distress and suffering which is 
 perpetually awake. Men do not suffer more 
 now than they did in past days ; but their suffer- 
 ings are better known. To my mind the 
 charities, regular and occasional, of this country, 
 are the most singular fact in its modern civiliza- 
 tion, and the best point of it. Gentleness to the 
 young, compassion to the sick and weak are 
 shown, even by men who are otherwise rough 
 and uncultured. But compassion is no enemy 
 to justice and fair dealing, for the man who is 
 educated in generous sympathy for others in 
 their distress, has by the very process, taught 
 himself to consider and give due weight to the
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 169 
 
 rights of others. But such an education has 
 been very slowly imparted, though its develop- 
 ment is the most hopeful factor in the moral 
 progress of the English people. 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII. 
 
 PUBLIC OPINION. 
 
 I HAVE stated, more than once in the preceding 
 pages, that the course of civil and material 
 progress in England has not been continuous, 
 but has been interrupted ; that at times very 
 remote the prospects of the English citizen have 
 been brighter than they were at times com- 
 paratively recent ; and that, in short, the history 
 of his political and social life has not been that 
 of a level course, but has been varied by exalta- 
 tion and depression. The Englishman was 
 more free and was better off in the fifteenth 
 than he was in the sixteenth century, in the 
 first half of the eighteenth than in the first half 
 of the nineteenth. There have, indeed, been 
 times in which public liberty and the progress 
 of the people seemed to be hanging in the 
 balance, and only what seem to be accidents 
 saved the nation from a decline like that of 
 Spain and Italy. 
 
 Now that there must have been something 
 vital but not very visible in the national 
 character, which arrested forces or influences 
 which were unfavourable to its growth, and
 
 I 70 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 even at times perilous to its existence is manifest. 
 There were people who discerned it from time 
 to time. The earliest writer on the English 
 character and constitution is Fortescue, a judge 
 of the fifteenth century, and an adherent of the 
 House of Lancaster, whose banishment he 
 shared. In exile he wrote a book in praise of 
 the English constitution. It was for the use 
 of the young prince, the son of Henry VI., who 
 was slain at Tewkesbury fight in 1471, and was 
 intended to be a treatise on the art of govern- 
 ment for his guidance. The writer emphatically 
 insists on the superiority of law to the authority 
 of the sovereign. Even after this writer had 
 made his peace with the young prince's con- 
 queror, he saw no reason to alter his views on 
 the limitations put by the very life of the English 
 constitution on the prerogatives of government. 
 
 Henry VIII. was a far more absolute sove- 
 reign, in the sense of one whose will was other 
 men's law, than any king before him or since. 
 But he and his successors knew that there was 
 a limit beyond which they could not strain their 
 authority without serious danger to themselves. 
 The next family could not be taught by opposi- 
 tion or by reverses this important lesson, and 
 in consequence their history was full of calamities. 
 
 There always has been, in fact, a latent power 
 in ^the English people which leads them to 
 resent the mismanagement of their affairs. It 
 is remarkable that it has frequently been ex- 
 hibited at times when it was least expected. 
 The insurrection of the labourers in 1381 was
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. I 71 
 
 as unforeseen as a thunderstorm in a clear 
 sky. The revolution which led to the deposi- 
 tion of Richard, in 1399, was equally a surprise. 
 The House of Lancaster was victorious, and 
 seemed likely to put an end to the civil war in 
 the last days of the year 1460. In the spring 
 of 1461 the hopes of the party were lost. So 
 in the summer of 1688, there seemed no prospect 
 that the government of James would be overset. 
 In the winter of the same year, every one had 
 deserted him, and his case was hopeless. 
 Similarly, since in later times we have fortu- 
 nately exchanged parliamentary elections for 
 these violent efforts, and have reduced the 
 criticism of government to a system, people are 
 constantly surprised at the suddenness with 
 which, at the crisis of opinion, a change of con- 
 fidence is expressed by the public. The fact 
 is, opinions are slowly matured by processes 
 which are often undiscerned by people who are 
 supposed to make it their especial business to 
 watch and be on the look out for what is at hand. 
 Of course, it is to be expected that they only 
 who can act through the possible modes of 
 action will act. It is highly probable that the 
 law of Henry IV., which declared that the 
 county franchise belonged to all suitors in the 
 county court and others, and was therefore 
 equivalent to all the male inhabitants, declared 
 after all, only that to be law which had long 
 been custom. It is clear from what has been 
 said above (p. 100) that the people found out 
 that they had a new means of expressing their
 
 172 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 opinions, and that they used it to the alarm and 
 vexation of the majority, and that the concession 
 or admission was narrowed in future. It is not 
 at all unlikely, indeed, that the Lollards, who 
 were a great but secret power, exercised their 
 franchise in favour of those who furthered 
 reforms in Church and State. 
 
 The power of law, especially new law, was 
 very weak, and custom was in great degree law, 
 as long as law itself was custom. Now it is 
 quite certain that for a very long time, the 
 written law was supposed to be nothing more 
 than a comment on the unwritten, or as it was 
 called, the common law. Hence, whatever was 
 custom was sacred, and it was a custom, which 
 some people at the time recognized as an obli- 
 gatory custom, that men should right grievances 
 by force. Against this opinion, strongly but 
 secretly felt, rulers tried to set up, not only the 
 laws they enacted, and the powers by which 
 they strove to give effect to these laws, but 
 opinions about, for example, the divine right of 
 kings, the duty of passive obedience, and the 
 wickedness of resistance even to bad govern- 
 ment. We may depend on it that such opinions 
 would not have been inculcated in books and 
 in pulpits, had it not been that there was a 
 spirit abroad which they wished to check, and 
 saw that law by itself could not check. In 
 these later times men obey the law, and the 
 authority by which the law is exercised, much 
 more thoroughly than they did two or three 
 centuries ago, and therefore they have ceased
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 173 
 
 to need the propagation of opinions which were 
 intended to assist the law. 
 
 This habit of resisting law by force, bad and 
 mischievous as such a practice was, lasted very 
 long, and has had marked effects in modifying 
 law. It is, no doubt, disastrous that law should 
 be modified by the violence of those who refuse 
 to submit to it, or who connive at its breach, 
 but it is none the less true that some of the 
 most important reforms in civil life have been 
 effected by those who have deliberately broken 
 a law which they are convinced is unfair or even 
 ill-advised. Of course the proof of the perfec- 
 tion of law is that frame of mind in the general 
 public which leads them to the conviction that 
 what the law says is the best for them and the 
 best for society. Now in many, very many, 
 particulars, perhaps in most, this is the frame of 
 mind in which the vast majority of Englishmen 
 contemplate the greater part of the legal system 
 under which they live, at least as regards its 
 principles. 
 
 The education by which this result has been 
 arrived at is in the highest degree significant. 
 No result is more important in the making of a 
 nation than the formation of a sound public 
 opinion, and on nothing is such an opinion more 
 important than in a loyal acquiescence in the 
 laws under which a nation lives. But the pro- 
 cess by which this temper is developed is of the 
 highest value. To have tested one system, to 
 have noted its shortcomings and its excesses, to 
 have altered it, so as to keep what is serviceable
 
 I 74 THE BRITISH CITIZEN ! 
 
 in it, and to have rejected what is erroneous or 1 
 mischief-working, is the worthiest labour that 
 any one can be engaged in, and the happiest 
 result we can achieve. 
 
 The last English revolution happened nearly 
 two centuries ago. Since that time the English 
 people has without violence, but occasionally 
 with a great deal of plain speaking, been 
 amending its constitution. Other countries 
 have passed through violent action and violent 
 reaction, and many of them, as we are told, are 
 seething with forces which may at any time 
 explode with violence. The English people 
 has won for itself during the last two centuries 
 reforms in which all agree now, the struggle for 
 which was bitter, and from the issues of which 
 permanent enmities and feuds were expected. 
 It is not too much to say that there never was 
 a time in which political animosity was less 
 bitter, and political rivalry more generous. 
 
 CHAPTER XXIX. 
 
 PROGRESS UNDER REPRESSION. 
 
 IN point of fact, progress under a system of 
 repression, and in modern times, under a system 
 which justifies criticism and lawful resistance to 
 established practice, is the most useful process 
 by which the social education of a people may 
 be perfected. It is quite possible to extinguish 
 an opinion. It may be so ruthlessly persecuted
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 175 
 
 that it is deprived of all vitality, even though 
 the vitality is the growth of centuries. It may 
 be disproved so thoroughly that the continual 
 acceptance of the opinion may make a man 
 ridiculous. It may be examined so judiciously 
 that the better parts of the opinion may be ex- 
 panded and developed into a new principle of in- 
 finite value, while the worse parts may be thrown 
 aside as unworthy of any attention. It is not 
 difficult to illustrate these positions by details. 
 
 I have referred to the insurrection of the serfs 
 
 in 1381, and the agencies by which it was 
 
 brought about. The struggle for social freedom 
 
 was, in the main, led by those who were also 
 
 engaged in the struggle for the freedom of 
 
 religious opinion, not, it must be remembered 
 
 for the freedom of other persons' views, for 
 
 there was no theory of toleration at that time, 
 
 but for the substitution of a new, or as the 
 
 promoters would have said, an ancient creed, in 
 
 place of that which had been gradually corrupted. 
 
 The opinions held by these sectaries were 
 
 exceedingly distasteful to persons in authority. 
 
 The interests of the more opulent laity were 
 
 supposed to be threatened by the democratic, if 
 
 not socialist tone of the new doctrine, and the 
 
 interests of the clergy, by the persistent attacks 
 
 of the same teaching on the opinions and the 
 
 opulence of the hierarchy. Hence State and 
 
 Church conspired to quell the common foe, and 
 
 for a long time continual and relentless war was 
 
 carried on against it, every attempt being made 
 
 to discover, silence, and punish the preachers.
 
 I 76 THE BRITISH CITIZEN I 
 
 The chief seat of these new opinions was the 
 Eastern Counties, especially Norfolk, for a long 
 time the wealthiest county in England. There 
 is plenty of evidence as to the vigour with which 
 the crusade against the sectaries was carried on. 
 But the movement was not crushed. There is 
 little doubt that the Reformation in England 
 was more persistently aided by the tenets of the 
 Norfolk and Suffolk peasants than it was by the 
 teaching and authority of these reformers who 
 took their cue from the State. Repression had 
 not destroyed them, it had only rendered them 
 more acute, more silent, and more active. 
 
 In great degree the movement which led to 
 the war of succession in the fifteenth century 
 was an effort after reforms in the administration. 
 Henry VI. the son of the great warrior who 
 had invaded France, subdued it, and for a time 
 had annexed it was always a child, pious, even 
 saintly, but incapable of government. As his 
 reign went on the administration of affairs fell 
 into the hands of persons whom the people sus- 
 pected, distrusted, and finally detested. It is 
 quite clear that the Duke of York, who very 
 likely thought he had a better title to the crown 
 than the reigning king, aimed at nothing more 
 for a time than of displacing the king's bad 
 advisers and ministers, and of strengthening the 
 government by putting better men in their place. 
 But I do not wish to dwell on the causes which 
 led to what are called the Wars of the Roses. 
 
 It was chiefly in the Eastern Counties, where 
 the people were strongly predisposed to Wiklif's
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. I 77 
 
 reformation, that the duke and his associates 
 found supporters, while it was in the west of 
 England that the strength of their opponents 
 chiefly lay. 
 
 After the Reformation was begun and the 
 reaction under Mary Tudor was over, which 
 was materially aided by the Norfolk peasants 
 and artisans, who had good reason to be dis- 
 satisfied with the conduct of Edward VI.'s 
 guardians, the spirit of resistance to what was 
 believed to be an unlawful exercise of power on 
 the part of government was mainly kept up in 
 the same part of England. When the struggle 
 between king and Parliament began, the chief 
 strength of the latter was in the Eastern 
 
 ^> 
 
 Counties, who formed themselves into an asso- 
 ciation for political ends. Here it was that 
 Cromwell organized his wonderful army, which, 
 whatever may be the opinion that may be 
 formed as to the merits of the struggle, was the 
 most powerful instrument of warfare which has 
 ever been marshalled and employed. The 
 district in England which took the side of the 
 Parliament in the seventeenth century, had 
 almost exactly the same geographical limits as 
 that which took the side of the White Rose in 
 the fifteenth. 
 
 It is remarkable, too, that in this region arose 
 the first sect which openly avowed the principle 
 of toleration. It is not to be expected that any 
 established power, whether it be secular or 
 religious, should voluntarily abandon its autho- 
 rity over the conduct of men ; and it is not 
 
 N
 
 I 78 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 just to censure such powers for not taking the 
 initiative in such action, however wise it may 
 be in the end. You may search in vain for any 
 national Church, or for the matter of that any 
 national government, which has ever taken the 
 first step in acknowledging any right on the 
 side of those who resist or even criticise it. If 
 this phenomenon has never been exhibited we 
 must find the origin of the existing practice in 
 the general characteristics of human nature. 
 And, as I have stated, the various Church re- 
 formers who up to comparatively recent times 
 have quarrelled with the existing order of things, 
 have never pretended any consideration for those 
 whom they wished to supplant and remodel. 
 This was the motive with the Puritan, the 
 Presbyterian, and the Restored Churchman 
 of 1660. 
 
 The doctrine that it was not the business of 
 the Staie, in its religious aspect, to meddle with 
 the opinions of those who dissented from its 
 teaching or discipline was first taught by the 
 Independents or Congregationalists, and was 
 fundamental to their system. But this doctrine 
 and these sects were strongest from the first in 
 the old haunts of the Wiklif movement, in the 
 Eastern Counties of England, and was an 
 entirely spontaneous growth. 
 
 There is a repression which has, in the history 
 of English opinion and in the growth of the 
 English character, materially strengthened its 
 fibre and given vigour to its development. To 
 the stand made for the political liberties of
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 179 
 
 England and for the freedom of private judgment 
 in matters innocent, is in reality due the vigour 
 with which they have been asserted, affirmed, 
 maintained, and secured. We are heirs to a 
 thousand traditions from the times of the Great 
 Charter to the latest victories of popular liberty 
 and social justice. The struggle could not have 
 taken place without resistance, the resistance 
 was sure to take the form of repression, the 
 repression has always been ineffectual ; but the 
 character of the people has grown with the effort 
 it has made and the success it has achieved. 
 
 For generations the nation and its leaders 
 withstood the arbitrary government which some 
 of our kings tried to establish or continue. They 
 have been in the end victorious, and have over- 
 come all obstacles. But the loyalty to the 
 political institutions of the country has not been 
 shaken by the resistance which the people has 
 exhibited to some of those who have borne rule. 
 It is, I think, justly alleged that the attachment 
 of the English to the present royal house is far 
 more deep and far more reasonable than it has 
 been to any one of the families which have 
 reigned during past times in the country, and 
 compares favourably with the feeling which is 
 entertained elsewhere. The cause of order has 
 not suffered by the growth of popular liberty. 
 
 Again, the disabilities which attached to those 
 who dissented from the discipline and doctrine 
 of the national Church have been swept away. 
 In other countries this toleration, or rather 
 equality, has been followed by fierce onslaughts
 
 1 8o THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 on Christianity itself, and the establishment of 
 political parties whose very essence is the nega- 
 tion of all religious belief. This has not occurred 
 with us. The change which has been consum- 
 mated almost within modern experience has not 
 been accompanied in England by any such 
 result ; but on the contrary, there never was, 
 I believe, a time when the religious sense was 
 more active, more generous, more considerate, 
 and less aggressive. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX. 
 
 COLONIAL ENGLAND. 
 
 ONE of the most instructive facts in the narrative 
 of national progress, is the success with which 
 the English nation has overcome obstacles to 
 its development and growth. Its present posi- 
 tion is wholly without parallel in history. It 
 has made conquests like other peoples, but it 
 may be doubted, or at least it has been doubted, 
 whether these conquests are a source of strength, 
 or whether a reasonable estimate of them would 
 not detect that they are a cause of weakness. 
 At any rate, any conquering nation of which we 
 can read has invariably been unable to maintain 
 for a very prolonged period the effort which it 
 has made to rule over others. But the case is 
 very different with the colonies which the nation 
 and not the government has planted. They are 
 spread over the whole world. The English
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. iSl 
 
 people has settled North America, and the vast 
 islands of Australasia. Its government was by 
 no means wise at first, when it undertook to 
 deal with the descendants of the English race. 
 
 England has undoubtedly great natural ad- 
 vantages. Its climate is the most equable in 
 the world, at least in that part of the world 
 which is neither intolerably hot nor intolerably 
 cold. It is situated in that part of the globe 
 which, being surrounded by sea, and always 
 accessible, has the largest area inhabited by 
 civilized societies near its sea board, and it has 
 the largest variety of natural material, or physical 
 agents of industry within accessible distance. It 
 is better situated for manufacture and commerce 
 than any other part of the globe, and for both 
 of these in the greatest variety and of the 
 highest quality. These advantages have, how- 
 ever, been discovered and secured only after 
 considerable labour and after serious obstacles 
 have been surmounted ; for the progress of 
 England was very slow, and her success was 
 acknowledged long after that of those who were 
 earlier in the field. I do not say that she 
 profited by the failure of others, but she was 
 certainly able to avoid some of the errors into 
 which her neighbours and rivals fell. 
 
 England had no part in the discovery of the 
 sea passage to India, for that was the work of 
 the Portuguese. She had little in the discovery 
 of the New World, for that was mainly the 
 work of the Spaniards. When Spain exhausted 
 herself by conquest, she did not succeed to her
 
 1 82 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 power in the east, for this fell to the Dutch. 
 The principal acquisitions of England fora long 
 time were her colonies in the New World, which 
 were settled in a country the soil of which was 
 exceedingly poor, the climate of which was 
 marked by singular extremes, and the original 
 inhabitants of which were vigorous, wily, and 
 ferocious savages. The colonists were men 
 who fled from persecution, and some of them did 
 not learn generosity from the troubles through 
 which they had gone. Never, I believe, in the 
 history of mankind, were colonies founded, of 
 which the early struggles were more arduous. 
 In time they have grown into the great American 
 Republic, and probably before many generations 
 are over, this republic will contain the largest 
 number of persons living under one government 
 and constitution in the world. 
 
 The colonization of Australasia began a 
 century and a half after that of North America. 
 It was not the action of government, but of 
 private enterprise, for the English government 
 has never colonized, except with convicts, and 
 .the free settlers soon resented that practice. It 
 is very likely that much which these settlers did 
 was harsh, cruel, indefensible. They came upon 
 races which were wholly unable to make pro- 
 gress by themselves, or to assimilate with the 
 civilization which they witnessed, but who 
 became mischievous neighbours. It has been 
 seen over and over again that races which 
 cannot be civilized fade away when they come 
 in contact with the more vigorous neighbours of
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 183 
 
 their life, though they may struggle against the 
 process. The ancient inhabitants of Newfound- 
 land and of Tasmania have perished utterly. 
 The native New Zealander is rapidly passing 
 away, though he has been able to learn many of 
 the practices of civilized life. 
 
 The English people in these colonies of 
 private adventure, which have gradually adopted 
 the system of English public life and govern- 
 ment, have thriven exceedingly and rapidly. 
 But these colonies are unlike anything in 
 history, except those of ancient fame. The career 
 of these latter was remarkably brilliant, and 
 almost uniformly prosperous, though they had 
 a short existence, owing entirely to the fact that 
 the Greeks were never able to devise a national 
 and representative government, but always 
 halted at the stage of a single settlement. 
 Governments have established trading factories 
 and military colonies, but they have never been 
 able to make stable settlements. 
 
 The fact is, human communities are never 
 created by authority. Nations may make mili- 
 tary conquests, and may hold them long. But 
 the true colony is a voluntary settlement. The 
 settlement grows with more or less rapidity, 
 according to its opportunities. In course of 
 time it necessarily reaches the boundary of a 
 neighbouring settlement, and federation with its 
 neighbours becomes a practical and soon an 
 inevitable problem, which it is bound to solve, 
 and does solve in one way only. 
 
 That an Englishman, who takes account of
 
 1 84 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 his place among other peoples, should feel 
 strong in the growth of his race and in its diffu- 
 sion, by its own inherent vigour, over a vast and 
 ever-increasing area of the world, is perfectly 
 natural. But he should be also aware that he 
 has done this by his own energy, and by the 
 beneficent abstinence of government from the 
 pretence of directing him. Attempts were made 
 by the home government to assert its right over 
 the new country which the settler occupied, and 
 to reserve the soil to the crown, which means 
 the state. These schemes have been wisely 
 abandoned, and the colony is properly made the 
 lord of the land. Nor has the English govern- 
 ment committed for a century, the fatal error 
 which alienated the American plantations. It 
 has freely allowed to its colonial offspring privi- 
 leges and powers which it has long withheld 
 from its people at home. It has even patiently 
 permitted, from time to time, its colonies to 
 virtually lay, at their pleasure, the cost of exten- 
 sion and defence on the mother country, to levy 
 taxes on the English people without their 
 consent. Twenty years ago, nearly half the 
 British army was in the British colonies, at the 
 expense of the British nation, and engaged in 
 adding directly and indirectly to the wealth of 
 thriving colonists. At the present time the 
 expenditure of British capital, voluntarily ad- 
 vanced, we must admit, to the colonies has been 
 so enormous, that nearly all the public works of 
 these settlements have been constructed by it. 
 The payment of interest on this vast sum
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 185 
 
 secures to this country a perpetual excess of 
 imports over exports, and explains in part why 
 it is that in foreign trade, England seems to sell 
 so little in comparison with what she buys. 
 
 Into these colonies of the English race there 
 is annually poured the overplus of the English 
 people. Long habit, the comparative oppor- 
 tunity of ready prosperity, the existence of a 
 government whose machinery is easily compre- 
 hended, but above all, cheapness of transit and 
 proximity have induced the great number of 
 Englishmen who leave their native land to 
 choose the American republic as the place of 
 their new settlement. But many also go to 
 those other colonies of voluntary origin which 
 are settled in the Southern Seas. It is rare for 
 them to settle in colonies of conquest, and we 
 may be pretty sure, judging from the impulses 
 of Englishmen, that the attempts of other 
 nations to form government colonies will end in 
 conspicuous failure, and therefore need excite 
 no alarm. 
 
 At the present time, the Englishman who 
 would push his fortunes in another country can 
 find numerous communities, of the same blood 
 in the main with his own, with the same laws 
 and institutions, planted in the most desirable 
 parts of the world, and ready to welcome him 
 and his labours. He enters, at the moment 
 that he puts his foot on the shores of these 
 settlements, into all the privileges and rights of 
 those who have long sojourned there. The 
 colonist in our free colonies is an Englishman
 
 1 86 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 still. He has abandoned no old nationality, he 
 has entered on no new one. I cannot recall to 
 memory, out of all past history, any position 
 which has been so favourable to enterprise as 
 this is, any career which might be so easy and 
 so large. 
 
 The wonder is that more Englishmen do not 
 avail themselves of these wide opportunities, 
 and that the crowded industries of our country 
 do not seek these natural means of relief. As 
 it is, many, perhaps the best and most active 
 of our people, to whom the prospect of future 
 advancement by labour and energy is attractive, 
 do resort to these new regions. The free 
 colonies of the English people are the most 
 valuable and the most enduring of its acquisi- 
 tions, and they possess other qualities because 
 they owe their existence to the spontaneous 
 action of the nation, and are not tainted by a 
 violent origin. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXI. 
 
 THE RIGHT OF ASSOCIATION FOR PRIVATE AND 
 PUBLIC OBJECTS. 
 
 THE most notable fact in the modern life of the 
 Englishman, is the liberty of association which 
 he enjoys. It is in many particulars a very 
 recent concession. Of course, from very early 
 times partnership in business was allowed; in 
 equally early times trading companies were
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 187 
 
 chartered, and often gifted with great powers ; 
 in more recent times companies for foreign 
 trade were created and endowed with consider- 
 able privileges and monopolies. But this is not 
 the freedom of association of which I am think- 
 ing. I am referring to associations for private 
 ends, ostensibly innocent, though it may be dis- 
 tasteful to those who conceive themselves the 
 objects of such combinations. 
 
 For nearly five centuries the law was very 
 severe against combinations of workmen entered 
 into with the view of bettering wages. For 
 nearly half this time it appears that the law was 
 unsuccessful in its effort to put down these 
 associations. But for the other half it was. At 
 last, in 1824, the whole of this repressive legis- 
 lation was swept away, and associations of 
 labourers were tacitly legalized. Of course, the 
 concession was not intended to justify violent 
 action, but only to permit peaceable proceedings 
 on the part of those who joined these combina- 
 tions. The law will not and should not permit 
 force, and ought to protect those who are made 
 the objects of force. 
 
 Up to the same, or nearly the same period, 
 the English law looked with the greatest jealousy 
 and suspicion on political associations. Towards 
 the close of the last century, a society was 
 formed to which several of the peers belonged, 
 the object of which was to bring about Parlia- 
 mentary Reform. It is probable that the pro- 
 moters of this movement were incautious in 
 their admiration of the French Revolution, the
 
 1 88 THE BRITISH CITIZEN: 
 
 conduct of which was at the time comparatively 
 gentle, though the very first year of it was 
 marked by terrible excesses. Even after the 
 worst acts of the French Revolution had been 
 committed, there were many Englishmen who 
 thought that these acts were the consequence 
 of foolish and unwise intermeddling in the affairs 
 of France, and that if the people of that country 
 had been left alone, the excitement would have 
 rapidly exhausted itself. 
 
 But the government of the time was seriously 
 alarmed at what they conceived to be involved 
 in these associations, and appointed a committee 
 of secrecy, who recommended the suppression 
 of the Habeas Corpus Act, and the prosecution 
 of those who were the leaders of the movement. 
 These persons were imprisoned, tried, and ac- 
 quitted. There is no reason to believe that 
 they meditated any mischievous design what- 
 ever. One of them was, to the end of his life, 
 so profoundly attached to the constitution in 
 Church and State, that in our day he would be 
 considered a person of very pronounced conser- 
 vative opinions. 
 
 Foreign countries even now which profess to 
 have very free institutions, are very suspicious 
 of any associations and combinations which are 
 not immediately recognized by government. 
 Where the government is more or less despotic, 
 the policy of the State is to forbid and repress 
 such combinations. The consequence is that 
 the countries in which energetic efforts are made 
 to suppress concerted action swarm with secret
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. 189 
 
 societies, which constantly avow the most 
 dangerous purposes, and sometimes commit the 
 most atrocious crimes. The remedy adopted 
 is not merely the punishment of offenders 
 against the law, which is reasonable and just, 
 but more strict repression and more severe 
 control, with the result of exciting more bitter 
 resentment. 
 
 Sometimes a government tries to meet un- 
 wise and unjust demands half way by conceding 
 a part at least of what these persons require 
 Now it is a very dangerous thing for a govern- 
 ment or a legislature to undertake such changes, 
 because, apart from the wrong it is doing, it is 
 going beyond its proper province, which is to 
 see that right is done to all, and wrong is for- 
 bidden and checked. For if it is once sup- 
 posed that government intends to undertake the 
 shaping of a citizen's life for him, and lay down 
 the rules by which he is to seek his fortunes or 
 earn his bread, it makes itself responsible for 
 his failure. Three fourths of the social diffi- 
 culties in which foreign governments find them- 
 selves have arisen from the practice of over- 
 governing their subjects in matters where it is 
 far better that individuals should find out their 
 own path or career for themselves. 
 
 Fortunately, for more than half a century, the 
 English government has abandoned all inter- 
 ference with the liberty of innocent associations. 
 The consequence has been that not only is the 
 English people almost entirely untainted with 
 theories of communism, and still less disposed
 
 THE BRITISH CITIZEN : 
 
 to vindicate rights, as they conceive them, by 
 violence, but they have learnt thoroughly that 
 honest and fair self-help is the only legitimate 
 means which should be adopted by persons who 
 try to better themselves, either as individuals or 
 in concert. 
 
 Many associations have been formed in Eng- 
 land during the last fifty years, the purposes of 
 which have been very adversely criticised, which 
 have failed or succeeded. But hardly any of 
 these, in the course of its career, has been 
 marked by violence. English people are familiar 
 with debates on every conceivable subject, and 
 generally debate with moderation and fairness, 
 even when they are not convinced. The 
 freedom of the press has been followed by 
 temperate action on the part of the press, the 
 freedom of public meeting and association has 
 been used temperately, and violence is univer- 
 sally disclaimed and condemned. 
 
 It is quite possible that people may combine 
 or associate together for ends which could be, 
 if achieved, disastrous or mischievous. But as 
 long as they speak out and keep the peace, they 
 may be criticised, and if the opinion of the 
 public is hostile to them, will be criticised. If 
 people in power try to prevent the utterances 
 of such persons, they are apt to give the im- 
 pression that the advocates of the new opinions 
 are desiring what is right and just, and that 
 they who seek to coerce them have an advantage 
 which cannot be defended, and should be taken 
 away. It is, therefore, the wisdom of govern-
 
 HIS RIGHTS AND PRIVILEGES. IQI 
 
 ment to allow the freest vent to opinion, and to 
 leave its merits to be settled by debate. There 
 is no reason to fear that in this country the acts 
 of legislation will be too rapid, and that the 
 acceptance of a conclusion which has all the 
 appearance of popularity will be premature. 
 
 Perfect freedom of speech and opinion is the 
 most conservative force which society can em- 
 ploy. In the first place, many men are content 
 with the protest which the utterance of their 
 opinions implies, and having made the utterance, 
 will not seek the means by which such an opinion 
 can be made a matter of practical action. In 
 the next place, the agency by which opinion is 
 moulded into law or practice is very slow. In 
 the third the energy by which change is effected 
 is so rare, that in most cases it has to be assisted 
 by some extraordinary or unforeseen event. 
 There is hardly a fundamental change in English 
 institutions or practice which has formed an ex- 
 ception to this rule of difficulty, and the difficulty 
 is enhanced the more freely discussion and pre- 
 liminary action on the subject is allowed and 
 encouraged. If it is the privilege of a British 
 citizen to promote reforms, it is equally his 
 privilege to resist and delay them. 
 
 If one examines all the great changes which 
 have been effected by Parliament in the con- 
 stitution, the social habits, the trade, the adminis- 
 tration of law, or the power of interests in this 
 country, it will be found that the progress of 
 opinion in Parliament is as slow, and as much the 
 effect of effort, as it is in the mind of the public.
 
 THE BRITISH CITIZEN. 
 
 It generally makes its appearance in Parlia- 
 ment for the first time on the motion of some 
 private member. It is rejected at first by a 
 large majority. It is repeated and the majority 
 diminishes. It finally gets a majority. It is 
 then, generally still on the motion of a private 
 member, and those who go with him, introduced 
 as a bill. Here it has to encounter great risks, 
 and if it succumbs to one of these risks, it is 
 lost for a year. Parliament watches opinion 
 outside them very closely, the press, public 
 meetings, petitions, and wisely enough will not 
 change till the matter is fully discussed outside. 
 No person can carry any bill which the govern- 
 ment of the day does not support, and if he be 
 really desirous to get what he wants, he wishes 
 that the government should take the matter out 
 of his hands. A generation often passes between 
 the inception of a change and its completion. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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 With Four full-page Woodcuts. Crown 8 vo Cloth boards 3 6 
 
 Valley of Baca (The). By the Author of "Douglas 
 
 Deane," &c. With Three page Woodcuts. Crown 8vo. Cloth bds i 6 
 
 Wild Goose Chase (A). By F. S. POTTER. With 
 
 Three page Woodcuts. Crown 8vo Cloth boards i 6 
 
 LONDON : 
 
 NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, CHARING CROSS, W.C.; 
 
 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C. ; 26, ST. GEORGE'S PLACE. S.W. 
 
 BRIGHTON: 135, NORTH STREET.
 
 Date Due 
 
 Library Bureau Cat. No. 1137 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 Mil III I II II 
 
 A 001 045 301 7