bled when the necessary leader was gone.

The Commonwealth is the second stage on the road of revolution, which
started from the Netherlands, and went on to America and France, and
is the centre of the history of the modern world. Seen from a
distance the value of that epoch is not in that which it created, for
it left not creations but ruins, but in the prodigious wealth of ideas
which it sent into the world. It supplied the English Revolution, the
one that succeeded, the American, the French, with its material. And
its ideas became efficacious and masterful by denying their origin.
For at first they were religious, not political theories. When they
renounced their theological parentage, and were translated into the
scientific terms of politics, they conquered and spread over the
nations, as general truths, not as British exports. For a long time
to come we meet with little that goes beyond the conservatism of
Hobbes, or the liberalism of Vane, and Harrington, and Milton, and of
Lilburne in his saner moments. That is our inheritance from the Long
Parliament, the Civil War, and the Commonwealth.

We have to deal with events which belong essentially to Constitutional
History, and must treat them with a light touch, that we may not
trespass on appropriated ground. Our topic is, how absolute monarchy,
which just then succeeded so brilliantly over the Channel, was
attempted in England, under conditions of no apparent danger, failed
and failed at a great cost. And how, in the course of the struggle,
ideas were developed which proved ultimately strong enough, as well
as sufficiently lasting, to carry out an entirely new structure of
constitutional government. It is the point where the history of
nations turned into its modern bed. It is the point also where the
Englishman became the leader of the world.

XII.

THE RISE OF THE WHIGS

THE LIBERAL ideas bred in sectarian circles, here And in America, did
not become the common property of mankind until they were detached
from their theological root, and became the creed of a party. That is
the transition which occupies the reign of Charles II. It is the era
in which parties took the place of churches as a political force.

A gentleman has written to remind me that the Independents did not
jointly or corporately renounce the connection between Church and
State, or assert religious liberty as a principle of government. They
did individually that which they nev