e of achieving still more
brilliant and decisive triumphs, which were never to cease till he had
carried his victorious march far into the heart of France itself.

At such a time it may well be supposed that the attention of the new
ministry was too fully occupied with measures necessary for the conduct
of the war to leave it much time for domestic legislation. Yet even its
first session was not entirely barren.

In the first excitement of the Restoration, when the nation was still
exasperated at the recollection of what it had suffered under the
triumphant domination of the Puritans, two laws had been framed to
chastise them, conceived in a spirit as intolerant and persecuting as
had dictated the very worst of their own. One, which was called the
Conventicle Act, inflicted on all persons above the age of sixteen, who
should be present at any religious service performed in any manner
differently from the service of the Church of England, in any
meeting-house, where more than five persons besides the occupiers of the
house should be present, severe penalties, rising gradually to
transportation; and gave a single magistrate authority to convict and to
pass sentence on the offenders. The other, commonly known as the Five
Mile Act, forbade all ministers, of any sect, who did not subscribe to
the Act of Uniformity, and who refused to swear to their belief in the
doctrine of passive obedience, from teaching in any school, and from
coming within five miles of any city, corporate town, or borough sending
members to Parliament, or any town or village in which they themselves
had resided as ministers. The latter statute had fallen into complete
disuse, and many of the provisions of the former had been relaxed,
though magistrates in general construed the relaxing enactments as
leaving the relaxations wholly at their discretion to grant or to
withhold, and were very much in the habit of withholding or abridging
them. Other statutes, such as the Test Act, had subsequently been passed
against every sect of Dissenters, though they had only imposed civil
disabilities, and had not inflicted penalties. But the new
Prime-minister was a man to whose disposition anything resembling
persecution was foreign and repugnant. Before his predecessor's unhappy
death he had already discussed with him the propriety of abolishing laws
conceived in such a spirit; and he no sooner found himself at the head
of the government than he prepared a bill to c