ity to his Friend in the
Country_, which was ordered to be burnt by the Privy Council; and
wherein he gave an account of the debates in the Lords on a Bill
"to prevent the dangers which may arise from persons disaffected
to the Government," in April and May 1675. It was actually
proposed by this Bill to make compulsory on all officers of
Church or State, and on all members of both Houses, an oath, not
only declaring it unlawful upon any pretence to take arms against
the King, but swearing to endeavour at no time the alteration of
the government in Church and State. To that logical position had
the Royalist spirit come within fifteen years of the Restoration;
Charles II., according to Burnet, being much set on this scheme,
which, says Locke, was "first hatched (as almost all the
mischiefs of the world have been) amongst the great churchmen."
The bishops and clergy, by their outcry, had caused Charles's
Declaration of Indulgence (March 17th, 1671) to be cancelled, and
the great seal broken off it; they had "tricked away the rights
and liberties of the people, in this and all other countries,
wherever they had had opportunity . . . that priest and prince
may, like Castor and Pollux, be worshipped together as divine,
in the same temple, by us poor lay-subjects; and that sense
and reason, law, properties, rights, and liberties shall be
understood as the oracles of those deities shall interpret."

There seems no doubt that the extinction of liberty was as
vigorously aimed at as it was nearly achieved at the period Locke
describes, under the administration of Lord Danby. But the Bill,
though carried in the Lords, was strongly contested. Locke says
that it occupied sixteen or seventeen whole days of debate, the
House sitting often till 8 or 9 P.M., or even to midnight. His
account of the speakers and their arguments is one of the most
graphic pages of historical painting in our language; but it is
said to have been drawn up at the desire, and almost at the
dictation, of Locke's friend, Lord Shaftesbury, who himself took
a prominent part against the Bill. Fortunately, it never got
beyond the House of Lords, a dispute between the two Houses
leading to a prorogation of Parliament and so to the salvation of
liberty. But the whole episode impresses on the mind the force of
the current then, as always, flowing in favour of arbitrary
government throughout our history, as well as a sense of the very
narrow margin by which liberty of