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Title: The Rise of the Democracy

Author: Joseph Clayton

Release Date: October 23, 2006 [eBook #19609]

Language: English

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THE RISE OF THE DEMOCRACY

by

JOSEPH CLAYTON

Author of "Leaders of the People" "Bishops as Legislators," etc. etc.

With Eight Full-Page Plates

Cassell and Company, Ltd.
London, New York, Toronto and Melbourne
1911
All Rights Reserved

[Illustration: KING JOHN GRANTING MAGNA CHARTA

From the Fresco in the Royal Exchange, by Ernest Normand.

_By permission of Messrs. S. Hildesheimer & Co., Ltd._]

PREFACE

This short account of the rise of political democracy is necessarily but an
outline of the matter, and while it is not easy to define the exact limits,
there is no difficulty in noting omissions. For instance, there is scarcely
any reference to the work of poets or pamphleteers. John Ball's rhyming
letters are quoted, but not the poems of Langland, and the political songs
of the Middle Ages are hardly mentioned. The host of political pamphleteers
in the seventeenth century are excluded, with the exception of Lilburne and
Winstanley, whose work deserves better treatment from posterity than it
received from contemporaries. Defoe's vigorous services for the Whigs are
unnoticed, and the democratic note in much of the poetry of Burns, Blake,
Byron and Shelley is left unconsidered, and the influence of these poets
undiscussed. The anti-Corn Law rhymes of Ebenezer Eliot, and the Chartist
songs of Ernest Jones were notable inspirations in their day, and in our
own time