) when it is seen
that all are being taxed for national purposes; and (2) the opinion finds
acceptance that responsibilities of citizenship should be borne by all who
have reached the age of manhood and are of sound mind.

To sketch the rise of democracy in England is to trace the steady
resistance to kings who would govern without the advice of counsellors, and
to note the growing determination that these counsellors must be elected
representatives. Only when the absolutism of the Crown is ended and a
Parliament of elected members has become the real centre of government, is
it possible, without a revolution, for democracy to be established.

Much of this book is given up, then, to the old stories of kingly rule
checked and slowly superseded by aristocracy. And all the old attempts at
revolution by popular insurrection are again retold, not only because of
the witness they bear to the impossibility in England of achieving
democracy by the violent overthrow of government, but because they also
bear witness to the heroic resolution of the English people to take up arms
and plunge into a sea of troubles rather than bear patiently ills that were
unseemly for men to endure in silence. Popular insurrection failed, but
over and over again violence has been resorted to in the resistance to
tyranny, and has been justified by its victory. If Wat Tyler, Jack Cade,
and Robert Ket are known as beaten revolutionaries, Stephen Langton, Simon
of Montfort, and John Hampden are acclaimed as patriots for not disdaining
the use of armed resistance.

The conclusion is that a democratic revolution was not to be accomplished
in England by a rising of the people, but that forcible resistance even to
the point of civil war was necessary to guard liberties already won, or to
save the land from gross misgovernment. But always the forcible resistance,
when successful, has been made not by revolutionaries but by the strong
champions of constitutional government. The fruit of the resistance to John
was the Great Charter; of Simon of Montfort's war against Henry III., the
beginning of a representative Parliament; of the war against Charles, the
establishment of Parliamentary government. Lilburne and his friends hoped
that the civil war and the abolition of monarchy would bring in democracy,
though democracy was never in the mind of men like Hampden, who made the
war, and was utterly uncongenial to Cromwell and the Commonwealth men. But
the sanctity