fused to sit with the
Third Estate, they would never have been driven from their country."
"They would never have been driven from their country," answers the
other, "if they had agreed to the reforms proposed by M. Turgot." These
controversies can never be brought to any decisive test, or to any
satisfactory conclusion. But, as I believe that history, when we look at
it in small fragments, proves anything, or nothing, so I believe that
it is full of useful and precious instruction when we contemplate it
in large portions, when we take in, at one view, the whole lifetime of
great societies. I believe that it is possible to obtain some insight
into the law which regulates the growth of communities, and some
knowledge of the effects which that growth produces. They history of
England, in particular, is the history of a government constantly
giving way, sometimes peaceably, sometimes after a violent struggle,
but constantly giving way before a nation which has been constantly
advancing. The forest laws, the laws of villenage, the oppressive power
of the Roman Catholic Church, the power, scarcely less oppressive,
which, during some time after the Reformation, was exercised by the
Protestant Establishment, the prerogatives of the Crown, the censorship
of the Press, successively yielded. The abuses of the representative
system are now yielding to the same irresistible force. It was
impossible for the Stuarts, and it would have been impossible for them
if they had possessed all the energy of Richelieu, and all the craft of
Mazarin, to govern England as England had been governed by the Tudors.
It was impossible for the princes of the House of Hanover to govern
England as England had been governed by the Stuarts. And so it is
impossible that England should be any longer governed as it was governed
under the four first princes of the House of Hanover. I say impossible.
I believe that over the great changes of the moral world we possess as
little power as over the great changes of the physical world. We can
no more prevent time from changing the distribution of property and
of intelligence, we can no more prevent property and intelligence from
aspiring to political power, than we can change the courses of the
seasons and of the tides. In peace or in tumult, by means of old
institutions, where those institutions are flexible, over the ruins
of old institutions, where those institutions oppose an unbending
resistance, the great march