one hand,
and protection and patronage on the other, became, in the course of
time, the baser relation of haughty assumption and oppression on the one
hand, and the most abject servitude on the other. Descended from the
same stern Saxon stock, separated only by purely artificial barriers, by
the fortuitous circumstance of birth, the sturdy peasant could ill brook
the tyranny of the privileged class--those 'lords rich in some dozen
paltry villages.' That stern independence which has ever been the
prominent characteristic of the Saxon mind, revolted at the palpable
injustice of the relation of lord and serf. The aristocracy, on the
contrary, fortified in their arrogance, at a later day, by the irruption
of the Norman nobility, with their French ideas and customs, so far from
yielding to the signs of the times and the light of dawning
civilization, refused to give up one tittle of their assumed
prerogatives, and became even more exacting in their demands, more lofty
in their supposed superiority. Thus was engendered between the two
classes a bitterness of feeling, a spirit of antagonism, that has never
yet disappeared. Patiently did the peasant bide his time, and only when
the tyranny became utterly unendurable did the movement commence which
has swept downward to our time, reiving away one by one the miscalled
privileges of the favored class, bringing, year by year, the condition
of the laborer nearer to the true balance of society.

This antagonism reached its height in the Cromwellian era, and the men
of those times stand forth upon the page of history as the exponents of
the great principles of civil freedom. The strength of the Cromwellian
party lay in the fact that it was composed almost entirely of the
laboring and the middle classes, the bone and sinew of the land. Then
for the first time in English history the world saw the plebeian pitted
against the aristocrat, and the strife which ensued involved not so much
the question of kingly prerogative and the 'divine right' of monarchs,
as the pent-up feuds of ages--feuds arising from the most flagrant
injustice and wrong on the one hand and forced submission on the other.
This of itself was enough to lend to the contest a character of ferocity
which well might make civilization turn pale. But even this bitterness
was slight compared with that engendered by the _religious_ element of
the war. The history of the world has shown no wars so cruel and bloody,
no crimes so