applied. Many of the wrongs and follies
that paralyzed thought and industry were dragged to light. Hoary
absurdities that smothered law and gospel under the foul mass of
privilege and superstition, and made them a curse instead of a
blessing, shrank before the storm of ridicule and denunciation. Those
which did not at once succumb were placed in a position of publicity
and exposure in which they could not long survive. The great upheaval
of which the French Revolution was a part was thus originated.

Sounder political ideas were brought within reach of the masses, till
then not recipient, it may almost be said, of any political ideas
at all. Statesmen and governments were similarly enlightened,
Adam Smith's declaration of commercial antedated by two years Mr.
Jefferson's of political independence. The atrocities of the English
criminal code, approaching those of Draco, were put in process of
correction, though, as usual in British reforms, it took half a
century to effect their complete removal; a woman having been, if we
recollect rightly, hanged for a trifling theft in the last years of
George IV. This same slowness of that conservative but persevering
people is calculated to blind us to the operation among them of
deep-seated and active influences. Hardly till 1815 can we discover
in England any fervor, much less efficiency, in the demand for an
extension of popular rights and relaxation of the grasp of privilege.
Irish manufactures continued to be distinctly and rigidly repelled
from competition with English by formal statute; Jewish and Catholic
disqualification was maintained; the game-laws and the rotten-borough
system, which conferred on the nobility and gentry arbitrary power
over the purse and person of the commonalty, were determinedly upheld;
counsel was only nominally allowed to the defendant in criminal cases;
chancery withheld or plundered without resistance or appeal; and there
can be no doubt that life and property were better protected by law
in France at the fall of the First Napoleon than in Great Britain.
Nevertheless, the movement had begun in the latter country forty years
before. A generation had passed since the battle of Culloden, and the
island was at length indissolubly and efficiently one. It shared fully
in the intellectual impulse of the day. Victorious in all its latest
struggles and freed from all sources of internal danger, it might
naturally have been expected to enter at once on a car