ionalities with differences in language,
religion, and institutions the relationship was almost forgotten, and
in the intensity of later rivalry is not always even now remembered.
It is, however, so close that at any epoch there is traceable a common
movement which occupies them all. By the end of the fourteenth century
they had secured their modern form in territorial and race unity with
a government by monarchy more or less absolute. The fifteenth century
saw with the strengthening of the monarchy the renascence of the fine
arts, the great inventions, the awakening of enterprise in discovery,
the mental quickening which began to call all authority to account.
The sixteenth was the age of the Reformation, an event too often
belittled by ecclesiastics who discern only its schismatic character,
and not sufficiently emphasized by historians as the most pregnant
political fact of any age with respect to the rise and growth of free
institutions.

The seventeenth century saw in England the triumph of political ideas
adapted to the new state of society which had arisen, but subversive
of the tyrannical system which had done its work, a work great and
good in the creation of peoples and the production of social order out
of chaos. For a time it seemed as if the island state were to become
the overshadowing influence in all the rest of Europe. By the middle
of the century her example had fired the whole continent with notions
of political reform. The long campaign which she and her allies waged
with varying fortune against Louis XIV, commanding the conservative
forces of the Latin blood, and the Roman religion ended unfavorably to
the latter. At the close of the Seven Years' War there was not an
Englishman in Europe or America or in the colonies at the antipodes
whose pulse did not beat high as he saw his motherland triumphant in
every quarter of the globe.

But these very successes, intensifying the bitterness of defeat and
everything connected with it, prevented among numerous other causes
the triumph of constitutional government anywhere in continental
Europe. Switzerland was remote and inaccessible; her beacon of
democracy burned bright, but its rays scarcely shone beyond the
mountain valleys. The Dutch republic, enervated by commercial success
and under a constitution which by its intricate system of checks was a
satire on organized liberty, had become a warning rather than a model
to other nations.

The other members