it was universally acknowledged that the claims of all the
contending Plantagenets were united in the house of Tudor.

Meanwhile a change was proceeding infinitely more momentous than the
acquisition or loss of any province, than the rise or fall of
any dynasty. Slavery and the evils by which slavery is everywhere
accompanied were fast disappearing.

It is remarkable that the two greatest and most salutary social
revolutions which have taken place in England, that revolution which, in
the thirteenth century, put an end to the tyranny of nation over nation,
and that revolution which, a few generations later, put an end to the
property of man in man, were silently and imperceptibly effected. They
struck contemporary observers with no surprise, and have received from
historians a very scanty measure of attention. They were brought about
neither by legislative regulations nor by physical force. Moral causes
noiselessly effaced first the distinction between Norman and Saxon, and
then the distinction between master and slave. None can venture to fix
the precise moment at which either distinction ceased. Some faint traces
of the old Norman feeling might perhaps have been found late in the
fourteenth century. Some faint traces of the institution of villenage
were detected by the curious so late as the days of the Stuarts; nor has
that institution ever, to this hour, been abolished by statute.

It would be most unjust not to acknowledge that the chief agent in
these two great deliverances was religion; and it may perhaps be doubted
whether a purer religion might not have been found a less efficient
agent. The benevolent spirit of the Christian morality is undoubtedly
adverse to distinctions of caste. But to the Church of Rome such
distinctions are peculiarly odious; for they are incompatible with other
distinctions which are essential to her system. She ascribes to every
priest a mysterious dignity which entitles him to the reverence of every
layman; and she does not consider any man as disqualified, by reason
of his nation or of his family, for the priesthood. Her doctrines
respecting the sacerdotal character, however erroneous they may be, have
repeatedly mitigated some of the worst evils which can afflict society.
That superstition cannot be regarded as unmixedly noxious which, in
regions cursed by the tyranny of race over race, creates an aristocracy
altogether independent of race, inverts the relation between the
oppresso