account of passions and follies of
which it had little cognisance. But the supreme power of the nobility
had passed to a committee, from the committee to a Council of Ten, from
the Ten to three Inquisitors of State; and in this intensely centralised
form it became, about the year 1600, a frightful despotism. I have shown
you how Machiavelli supplied the immoral theory needful for the
consummation of royal absolutism; the absolute oligarchy of Venice
required the same assurance against the revolt of conscience. It was
provided by a writer as able as Machiavelli, who analysed the wants and
resources of aristocracy, and made known that its best security is
poison. As late as a century ago, Venetian senators of honourable and
even religious lives employed assassins for the public good with no more
compunction than Philip II. or Charles IX.

The Swiss Cantons, especially Geneva, profoundly influenced opinion in
the days preceding the French Revolution, but they had had no part in
the earlier movement to inaugurate the reign of law. That honour belongs
to the Netherlands alone among the Commonwealths. They earned it, not by
their form of government, which was defective and precarious, for the
Orange party perpetually plotted against it, and slew the two most
eminent of the Republican statesmen, and William III. himself intrigued
for English aid to set the crown upon his head; but by the freedom of
the press, which made Holland the vantage-ground from which, in the
darkest hour of oppression, the victims of the oppressors obtained the
ear of Europe.

The ordinance of Louis XIV., that every French Protestant should
immediately renounce his religion, went out in the year in which James
II. became king. The Protestant refugees did what their ancestors had
done a century before. They asserted the deposing power of subjects over
rulers who had broken the original contract between them, and all the
Powers, excepting France, countenanced their argument, and sent forth
William of Orange on that expedition which was the faint dawn of a
brighter day.

It is to this unexampled combination of things on the Continent, more
than to her own energy, that England owes her deliverance. The efforts
made by the Scots, by the Irish, and at last by the Long Parliament to
get rid of the misrule of the Stuarts had been foiled, not by the
resistance of Monarchy, but by the helplessness of the Republic. State
and Church were swept away; new institut