of monarchy received its death-blow from Cromwell, and
perished with the deposing of James II.; and there has been no
resurrection. To the Whig rule we owe the transference of political power
from the Crown to Parliament. Once it is manifest that Parliament is the
instrument of authority, that the Prime Minister and his colleagues rule
only by the permission and with the approval of the House of Commons, and
that the House of Commons itself is chosen by a certain number of electors
to represent the nation, then it is plain that the real sovereignty is in
the electors who choose the House of Commons. As long as the electors are
few and consist of the great landowners and their satellites, then the
constitutional government is aristocracy, and democracy is still to come.

And just as discontent with monarchy, and its obvious failure as a
satisfactory form of government, brought in aristocracy, so at the
beginning of the nineteenth century discontent with aristocracy was rife,
and a new industrial middle-class looked for "Parliamentary reform," to
improve the condition of England.

BRITISH DEMOCRACY EXPERIMENTAL, NOT DOCTRINAIRE

Resistance to royal absolutism, culminating in the acknowledged ascendancy
of Parliament and the triumphant aristocracy of 1688, was never based on
abstract principles of the rights of barons and landowners, but sprang from
the positive, definite conviction that those who furnished arms and men for
the king, or who paid certain moneys in taxation, were entitled to be heard
in the councils of the king; and the charters given in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries--from Henry I. to Henry III.--confirmed this
conviction. The resistance to the Stuarts was still based on the conviction
that direct taxation conferred political privileges, but now the claim to
speak in the great council of the realm had become a request to be listened
to by the king, and passed rapidly from that to a resolution that the king
should have no money from Parliament if he refused to listen. The practical
inconvenience of a king altogether at variance with Parliament was held to
be sufficient justification for getting rid of James II., and for hobbling
all future kings with the Bill of Rights.

The dethronement of aristocracy in favour of democracy has proceeded on
very similar lines. The mass of English people were far too wretched and
far too ignorant at the end of the eighteenth century to care anything
about abstract "