No More Learning

6657 (#33) ############################################

HORACE GREELEY
6657
country had for seven years been traversed and wasted by con-
tending armies, almost from end to end. Cities and villages had
been laid in ashes. Habitations had been deserted and left to
decay. Farms, stripped of their fences and deserted by their
owners, had for years produced only weeds. Camp fevers, with
the hardships and privations of war, had destroyed many more
than the sword; and all alike had been subtracted from the most
effective and valuable part of a population always, as yet, quite
inadequate. Cripples and invalids, melancholy mementoes of the
yet recent struggle, abounded in every village and township.
Habits of industry had been unsettled and destroyed by the
anxieties and uncertainties of war. The gold and silver of ante-
Revolutionary days had crossed the ocean in exchange for arms
and munitions. The Continental paper, which for a time more
than supplied (in volume) its place, had become utterly worth-
less. In the absence of a tariff, which the Confederate Congress
lacked power to impose, our ports, immediately after peace, were
glutted with foreign luxuries,-gewgaws which our people were
eager enough to buy, but for which they soon found themselves
utterly unable to pay. They were almost exclusively an agri-
cultural people, and their products, save only tobacco and indigo,
were not wanted by the Old World, and found but a very
restricted and inconsiderable market even in the West Indies,
whose trade was closely monopolized by the nations to which
they respectively belonged. Indian corn and potatoes, the two
principal edibles for which the poor of the Old World are largely
indebted to America, were consumed to a very limited extent,
and not at all imported, by the people of the Eastern Hemi-
sphere. The wheat-producing capacity of our soil, at first un-
surpassed, was soon exhausted by the unskillful and thriftless
cultivation of the eighteenth century. Though one third of the
labor of the country was probably devoted to the cutting of tim-
ber, the axe-helve was but a pudding-stick, while the plow was a
rude structure of wood, clumsily pointed and shielded with iron.
A thousand bushels of corn (maize) are now grown on our West-
ern prairies at a cost of fewer days' labor than were required for
the production of a hundred in New York or New England
eighty years ago. And though the settlements of that day were
nearly all within a hundred miles of tide-water, the cost of
transporting bulky staples, for even that distance, over the exe-
crable roads that then existed, was about equal to the present
XII-417


## p. 6658 (#34) ############################################

6658
HORACE GREELEY
charge for transportation from Illinois to New York. Industry
was paralyzed by the absence or uncertainty of markets. Idle-
ness tempted to dissipation, of which the tumult and excitement
of civil war had long been the school. Unquestionably, the
moral condition of our people had sadly deteriorated through the
course of the Revolution. Intemperance had extended its rav-
ages; profanity and licentiousness had overspread the land; a
coarse and scoffing infidelity had become fashionable, even in
high quarters; and the letters of Washington and his compatriots
bear testimony to the wide-spread prevalence of venality and
corruption, even while the great issue of independence or sub-
jugation was still undecided.
The return of peace, though it arrested the calamities, the
miseries, and the desolations of war, was far from ushering in
that halcyon state of universal prosperity and happiness which
had been fondly and sanguinely anticipated. Thousands were
suddenly deprived by it of their accustomed employment and
means of subsistence, and were unable at once to replace them.
Those accepted though precarious avenues to fame and fortune
in which they had found at least competence were instantly
closed, and no new ones seemed to open before them. In the
absence of aught that could with justice be termed a currency,
trade and business were even more depressed than industry.
Commerce and navigation, unfettered by legislative restriction,
ought to have been, or ought soon to have become, most flourish-
ing, if the dicta of the world's accepted political economists had
been sound; but the facts were deplorably at variance with their
inculcations. Trade, emancipated from the vexatious trammels of
the custom-house marker and gauger, fell tangled and prostrate
in the toils of the usurer and the sheriff. The common people,
writhing under the intolerable pressure of debt for which no
means of payment existed, were continually prompting their
legislators to authorize and direct those baseless issues of irre-
deemable paper money, by which a temporary relief is achieved
at the cost of more pervading and less curable disorders. In the
year 1786 the Legislature of New Hampshire, then sitting at
Exeter, was surrounded, evidently by preconcert, by a gathering
of angry and desperate men, intent on overawing it into an
authorization of such an issue. In 1786 the famous Shay's Insur-
rection occurred in western Massachusetts, wherein fifteen hun-
dred men, stung to madness by the snow-shower of writs to


## p. 6659 (#35) ############################################

HORACE GREELEY
6659
which they could not respond and executions which they had no
means of satisfying, undertook to relieve themselves from intol-
erable infestation and save their families from being turned into
the highways, by dispersing the courts and arresting the enforce-
ment of legal process altogether. That the seaboard cities,
depending entirely on foreign commerce, neither manufacturing
themselves nor having any other than foreign fabrics to dispose
of, should participate in the general suffering and earnestly scan
the political and social horizon in quest of sources and conditions
of comprehensive and enduring relief, was inevitable. And thus
Industrial paralysis, commercial embarrassment, and political dis-
order combined to overbear inveterate prejudice, sectional jealousy,
and the ambition of local magnates, in creating that more perfect
Union whereof the foundations were laid and pillars erected by
Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Madison, and their compeers in
the Convention which framed the Federal Constitution.
Yet it would not be just to close this hasty and casual glance
at our country under the old federation, without noting some
features which tend to relieve the darkness of the picture. The
abundance and excellence of the timber, which still covered at
least two-thirds of the area of the then States, enabled the com-
mon people to supply themselves with habitations which, however
rude and uncomely, were more substantial and comfortable than
those possessed by the masses of any other country on earth.
The luxuriant and omnipresent forests were likewise the sources
of cheap and ample supplies of fuel, whereby the severity of our
northern winters was mitigated, and the warm bright fireside of
even the humblest family, in the long winter evenings of our
latitude, rendered centres of cheer and enjoyment. Social inter-
course was more general, less formal, more hearty, more valued,
than at present. Friendships were warmer and deeper. Rela-
tionship, by blood or by marriage, was more profoundly regarded.
Men were not ashamed to own that they loved their cousins bet-
ter than their other neighbors, and their neighbors better than
the rest of mankind. To spend a month in the dead of winter
in a visit to the dear old homestead, and in interchanges of
affectionate greetings with brothers and sisters married and set-
tled at distances of twenty to fifty miles apart, was not deemed
an absolute waste of time, nor even an experiment in fraternal
civility and hospitality. And though cultivation was far less
effective than now, it must not be inferred that food was scanty


## p. 6660 (#36) ############################################

6660
HORACE GREELEY
or hunger predominant. The woods were alive with game, and
nearly every boy and man between fifteen and sixty years of age
was a hunter. The larger and smaller rivers, as yet unobstructed
by the dams and wheels of the cotton-spinner and power-loom
weaver, abounded in excellent fish, and at seasons fairly swarmed
with them. The potato, usually planted in the vegetable mold
left by recently exterminated forests, yielded its edible tubers
with a bounteous profusion unknown to the husbandry of our
day. Hills the most granitic and apparently sterile, from which
the wood was burned one season, would the next year produce
any grain in ample measure, and at a moderate cost of labor and
care. Almost every farmer's house was a hive, wherein the
great wheel" and the "little wheel" — the former kept in motion
by the hands and feet of all the daughters ten years old and
upward, the latter plied by their not less industrious mother-
hummed and whirled from morning till night. In the back
room, or some convenient appendage, the loom responded day by
day to the movements of the busy shuttle, whereby the fleeces
of the farmer's flock and the flax of his field were slowly but
steadily converted into substantial though homely cloth, sufficient
for the annual wear of the family, and often with something
over, to exchange at the neighboring merchant's for his groceries
and wares. A few bushels of corn, a few sheep, a fattened steer,
with perhaps a few saw-logs or loads of hoop-poles, made up the
annual surplus of the husbandman's products, helping to square
accounts with the blacksmith, the wheelwright, the minister, and
the lawyer, if the farmer was so unfortunate as to have any deal-
ings with the latter personage. His life during peace was passed
in a narrower round than ours, and may well seem to us tame,
limited, monotonous: but the sun which warmed him was identi-
cal with ours; the breezes which refreshed him were like those
we gladly welcome; and while his roads to mill and to meeting.
were longer and rougher than those we daily traverse, he doubt-
less passed them unvexed by apprehensions of a snorting locomo-
tive, at least as contented as we, and with small suspicion of his
ill fortune in having been born in the eighteenth instead of the
nineteenth century.
<<
The illusion that the times that were are better than those
that are, has probably pervaded all ages. Yet a passionately ear-
nest assertion which many of us have heard from the lips of the
old men of thirty to fifty years ago, that the days of their youth.


## p. 6661 (#37) ############################################

HORACE GREELEY
6661
were sweeter and happier than those we have known, will doubt-
less justify us in believing that they were by no means intolera-
ble. It is not too much to assume that the men by whose valor
and virtue American independence was achieved, and who lived
to enjoy for half a century thereafter the gratitude of their coun-
try and the honest pride of their children, saw wealth as fairly
distributed, and the labor of freemen as adequately rewarded, as
those of almost any other country or of any previous generation.
POLITICAL COMPROMISES AND POLITICAL LOG-ROLLING ›
From The American Conflict. Reprinted by permission of O. D. Case &
Co. , publishers, Hartford, Connecticut
POLIT
or
OLITICAL Compromises, though they have been rendered un-
savory by abuse, are a necessary incident of mixed or bal-
anced governments; that is, of all but simple, unchecked
despotisms. Wherever liberty exists, there diversities of judgment
will be developed; and unless one will dominates over all others,
a practical mean between widely differing convictions must some-
times be sought. If for example a legislature is composed of two
distinct bodies or houses, and they differ, as they occasionally will,
with regard to the propriety or the amount of an appropriation
required for a certain purpose, and neither is disposed to give
way,- a partial concession on either hand is often the most feasi-
ble mode of practical adjustment. Where the object contemplated
is novel, or non-essential to the general efficiency of the public
service, such as the construction of a new railroad, canal, or
other public work,-the repugnance of either house should suffice.
entirely to defeat or at least to postpone it; for neither branch
has a right to exact from the other conformity with its views on
a disputed point, as the price of its own concurrence in measures
essential to the existence of the government. The attempt there-
fore of the Senate of February-March, 1849, to dictate to the
House, "You shall consent to such an organization of the Terri-
tories as we prescribe, or we will defeat the Civil Appropriation
Bill, and thus derange if not arrest the most vital machinery of
the government,"-was utterly unjustifiable. Yet this should not
blind us to the fact that differences of opinion are at times
developed on questions of decided moment, where the rights of
each party are equal, and where an ultimate concurrence in one
-
――――――――


## p. 6662 (#38) ############################################

6662
HORACE GREELEY
common line of action is essential. Without some deference to
adverse convictions, no confederation of the insurgent colonies
was attainable-no Union of the States could have been effected.
And where the executive is, by according him the veto, clothed
with a limited power over the making of laws, it is inevitable
that some deference to his views, his convictions, should be
evinced by those who fashion and mature those laws. Under this
aspect, compromise in government is sometimes indispensable and
laudable.
But what is known in State legislation as log-rolling is quite
another matter. A has a bill which he is intent on passing, but
which has no intrinsic worth that commends it to his fellow
members. But B, C, D, and the residue of the alphabet, have
each his "little bill"; not perhaps specially obnoxious or objec-
tionable, but such as could not be passed on its naked merits.
All alike must fail, unless carried by that reciprocity of support
suggested by their common need and peril. An understanding is
effected between their several backers, so that A votes for the
bills of B, C, D, etc. , as the indispensable means of securing the
passage of his own darling; and thus a whole litter of bills
become laws, whereof no single one was demanded by the public
interest, or could have passed without the aid of others as un-
worthy as itself. Such is substantially the process whereby our
statute-books are loaded with acts which subserve no end but to
fill the pockets of the few, at the expense of the rights or the
interests of the many.


## p. 6663 (#39) ############################################

6663
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
(1837-1883)
EAN STANLEY, on reading one of Green's first literary produc-
tions, said: "I see you are in danger of becoming pictur-
esque. Beware of it. I have suffered from it. " Though
Green was then at an age when advice from such a source might
well have had some influence, his natural bent was even then too
strong to be affected by the warning. Born in Oxford in 1837, he
entered Jesus College, where he showed the same remarkable power
of reconstructing the life of the past that marked his historical writ-
ings in after years, and where his prefer-
ence for historical chronicles over the
classics, and his lack of verbal memory, puz-
zled his tutor and prevented his winning
especial distinction in the studies of his col-
lege course. On graduating in 1859 he en-
tered the Church, and in 1866 became vicar
of Stepney in East London. Here, besides
preaching and visiting, he was a leader in
the movement for improving the condition
of the East Side, and in the organization of
an effective system of charitable relief.
Nearly the whole of his meagre income be-
ing expended on his parish, he was obliged
to make up the deficit by writing articles
for the Saturday Review. These were mainly brief historical reviews
and essays, but some were of a light character dealing with social
topics. Hastily written, but incisive and original, many of them have
permanent value, and they were emended and published in a separate
volume under the title of 'Stray Studies in England and Italy,' after
his 'Short History of the English People' had made him famous.
JOHN R. GREEN
His health was fast breaking under the strain of his parish work;
and this, combined with the growing spirit of skepticism, induced him
to withdraw from active clerical work and accept an appointment as
librarian at Lambeth, where he was able to give much of his time
to historical study. He had at first planned a treatise on the Ange-
vin kings, but was urged by his friends to undertake something of
wider scope and more general interest. Accordingly he set to work



## p. 6664 (#40) ############################################

6664
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
on his Short History of the English People. ' The task before him
was difficult. He wished to make a book that would entertain the
general reader and at the same time be suggestive and instructive
to the scholar, and to compress it all within the limits of an "out-
line," a term usually associated with those bare, crabbed summaries
which are sometimes inflicted by teachers upon the young and de-
fenseless, but are avoided by general reader and scholar alike. How
far he succeeded appears from the fact that with the exception of
Macaulay's work, no treatise on English history has ever met with
such prompt and complete success among all classes of readers. The
vivid, picturesque style made it exceedingly popular, while the origi
nality of method and of interpretation won for it the praise of men
like Freeman and Stubbs. As to its accuracy, there is some differ-
ence of opinion. When the book first came out (1874), sharp reviewers
caught the historian in many slips, usually of a kind not to affect
his general conclusions, but serious enough to injure his reputation.
for accuracy.
Most of these errors were corrected in later editions,
and are not to be found in the longer History of the English Peo-
ple' (4 vols. ), which contains the material of the earlier work in an
expanded, but as some think, in a less interesting form.
His next work was in a field in which none could refuse him
credit for original research. The Making of England,' dealing with
the early part of the Anglo-Saxon period, and the 'Conquest of Eng-
land,' which carried the narrative down to 1052, show extraordinary
skill in handling the scanty historical materials of those times. He
was at work on the Conquest' at the time of his death, which oc-
curred in 1883. During the last years of his life his illness had fre-
quently interrupted his work; and but for the aid of his wife in
historical research as well as in the mechanical labor of amanuensis,
he would not have accomplished what he did. As it is, his friends
regard his actual achievements as slight compared to what his talents
promised had he lived. Still, these achievements entitle him to a
high place among modern historians. In accuracy he has many su-
periors; but in brilliancy of style, in human sympathy, and above all
in the power to make the past present and real, he has few equals.
« Fiction," he once said, "is history that didn't happen. " His own
books have the interest of novels without departing in essentials from
the truth.
Besides writing the works above mentioned, he issued a selection
of Readings from English History' (1879), and wrote with his wife a
Short Geography of the British Isles' (1881).


## p. 6665 (#41) ############################################

JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6665
THE BATTLE OF HASTINGS
From History of the English People'
N THE fourteenth of October, William led his men at dawn
O leads from Hastings to the
battle-field which Harold had chosen. From the mound of
Telham the Normans saw the host of the English gathered
thickly behind a rough trench and a stockade on the height of
Senlac. Marshy ground covered their right; on the left, the
most exposed part of the position, the hus-carles or body-guard
of Harold, men in full armor and wielding huge axes, were
grouped round the Golden Dragon of Wessex and the Standard
of the King. The rest of the ground was covered by thick
masses of half-armed rustics, who had flocked at Harold's sum-
mons to the fight with the stranger. It was against the centre
of this formidable position that William arrayed his Norman
knighthood, while the mercenary forces he had gathered in
France and Brittany were ordered to attack its flanks. A general
charge of the Norman foot opened the battle; in front rode the
minstrel Taillefer, tossing his sword in the air and catching it
again, while he chanted the song of Roland. He was the first of
the host who struck a blow, and he was the first to fall. The
charge broke vainly on the stout stockade, behind which the
English warriors plied axe and javelin with fierce cries of "Out!
out! " and the repulse of the Norman footmen was followed by a
repulse of the Norman horse. Again and again the duke rallied
and led them to the fatal stockade. All the fury of fight
that glowed in his Norseman's blood, all the headlong valor
that spurred him over the slopes of Val-ès-dunes, mingled that
day with the coolness of head, the dogged perseverance, the in-
exhaustible faculty of resource, which shone at Mortemer and
Varaville. His Breton troops, entangled in the marshy ground
on his left, broke in disorder; and as panic spread through the
army, a cry arose that the duke was slain. William tore off his
helmet: "I live," he shouted, "and by God's help I will conquer
yet! " Maddened by a fresh repulse, the duke spurred right at
the Standard; unhorsed, his terrible mace struck down Gyrth, the
King's brother; again dismounted, a blow from his hand hurled
to the ground an unmannerly rider who would not lend him his
steed. Amidst the roar and tumult of the battle, he turned the


## p. 6666 (#42) ############################################

6666
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
flight he had arrested into the means of victory. Broken as the
stockade was by his desperate onset, the shield-wall of the war-
riors behind it still held the Normans at bay, till William by a
feint of flight drew a part of the English force from their post
Turning on his disorderly pursuers, the duke cut
them to pieces, broke through the abandoned line, and made
himself master of the central ground. Meanwhile the French
and Bretons made good their ascent on either flank. At three
the hill seemed won; at six the fight still raged around the
Standard, where Harold's hus-carles stood stubbornly at bay, on a
spot marked afterwards by the high altar of Battle Abbey.
order from the duke at last brought his archers to the front.
Their arrow-flight told heavily on the dense masses crowded
around the King, and as the sun went down, a shaft pierced
Harold's right eye. He fell between the royal ensigns, and the
battle closed with a desperate melly over his corpse.
THE RISING OF THE BARONAGE AGAINST KING JOHN
From History of the English People'
THE
HE open resistance of the northern barons nerved the rest of
their order to action. The great houses who had cast away
their older feudal traditions for a more national policy were
drawn by the crisis into close union with the families which had
sprung from the ministers and councilors of the two Henrys. To
the first group belonged such men as Saher de Quinci, the Earl
of Winchester; Geoffrey of Mandeville, Earl of Essex; the Earl of
Clare, Fulk Fitz-Warin; William Mallet; the house of Fitz-Alan
and Gant. Among the second group were Henry Bohun and
Roger Bigod, the Earls of Hereford and Norfolk; the younger
William Marshal; and Robert de Vere. Robert Fitz-Walter, who
took the command of their united force, represented both parties
equally, for he was sprung from the Norman house of Brionne,
while the Justiciar of Henry the Second, Richard de Lucy, had
been his grandfather. Secretly, and on the pretext of pilgrim-
age, these nobles met at St. Edmundsbury, resolute to bear no
longer with John's delays. If he refused to restore their liber-
ties, they swore to make war on him till he confirmed them by
charter under the King's seal; and they parted to raise forces


## p. 6667 (#43) ############################################

JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6667
with the purpose of presenting their demands at Christmas.
John, knowing nothing of the coming storm, pursued his policy
of winning over the Church by granting it freedom of election,
while he embittered still more the strife with his nobles by de-
manding scutage from the northern nobles who had refused to
follow him to Poitou. But the barons were now ready to act;
and early in January in the memorable year 1215 they appeared
in arms to lay, as they had planned, their demands before the
King.
John was taken by surprise. He had asked for truce till
Easter-tide, and spent the interval in fevered efforts to avoid the
blow. Again he offered freedom to the Church, and took vows
as a Crusader against whom war was a sacrilege, while he called
for a general oath of allegiance and fealty from the whole body
of his subjects. But month after month only showed the King
the uselessness of further resistance. Though Pandulf was with
him, his vassalage had as yet brought little fruit in the way of
aid from Rome; the commissioners whom he sent to plead his
cause at the shire courts brought back news that no man would
help him against the charter that the barons claimed; and his
efforts to detach the clergy from the league of his opponents.
utterly failed. The nation was against the King. He was far
indeed from being utterly deserted. His ministers still clung to
him.
But cling as such men might to John, they clung to him
rather as mediators than adherents. Their sympathies went with
the demands of the barons when the delay which had been
granted was over, and the nobles again gathered in arms at
Brackley in Northamptonshire to lay their claims before the King.
Nothing marks more strongly the absolutely despotic idea of his
sovereignty which John had formed, than the passionate surprise
which breaks out in his reply. "Why do they not ask for my
kingdom? " he cried. "I will never grant such liberties as will
make me a slave! " The imperialist theories of the lawyers of
his father's court had done their work. Held at bay by the prac-
tical sense of Henry, they had told on the more headstrong
nature of his sons. Richard and John both held with Glanvill
that the will of the prince was the law of the land; and to fetter
that will by the customs and franchises which were embodied in
the barons' claims seemed to John a monstrous usurpation of his
rights. But no imperialist theories had touched the minds of


## p. 6668 (#44) ############################################

6668
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
<<
his people. The country rose as one man at his refusal. At the
close of May, London threw open her gates to the forces of
the barons, now arrayed under Robert Fitz-Walter as Marshal
of the Army of God and Holy Church. " Exeter and Lincoln
followed the example of the capital; promises of aid came from
Scotland and Wales; the northern barons marched hastily under
Eustace de Vesci to join their comrades in London. Even the
nobles who had as yet clung to the King, but whose hopes of
conciliation were blasted by his obstinacy, yielded at last to the
summons of the "Army of God. " Pandulf indeed, and Arch-
bishop Langton, still remained with John; but they counseled, as
Earl Ranulf and William Marshal counseled, his acceptance of
the Charter. None in fact counseled its rejection save his new
Justiciar, the Poitevin Peter des Roches, and other foreigners
who knew the barons purposed driving them from the land. But
even the number of these was small: there was a moment when
John found himself with but seven knights at his back, and
before him a nation in arms. Quick as he was, he had been
taken utterly by surprise. It was in vain that in the short res-
pite he had gained from Christmas to Easter he had summoned
mercenaries to his aid, and appealed to his new suzerain the
Pope. Summons and appeal were alike too late. Nursing wrath
in his heart, John bowed to necessity and called the barons to a
conference on an island in the Thames, between Windsor and
Staines, near a marshy meadow by the river-side, the meadow of
Runnymede. The King encamped on one bank of the river, the
barons covered the flat of Runnymede on the other. Their del-
egates met on the 15th of July on the island between them, but
the negotiations were a mere cloak to cover John's purpose of
unconditional submission. The Great Charter was discussed and
agreed to in a single day.
Copies of it were made and sent for preservation to the cathe-
drals and churches; and one copy may still be seen in the British
Museum, injured by age and fire, but with the royal seal still
hanging from the brown shriveled parchment. It is impossible
to gaze without reverence on the earliest monument of English
freedom which we can see with our own eyes and touch with our
own hands, the great Charter to which from age to age men
have looked back as the groundwork of English liberty. But in
itself the Charter was no novelty, nor did it claim to establish
any new constitutional principles. The Charter of Henry the


## p. 6669 (#45) ############################################

JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6669
First formed the basis of the whole, and the additions to it are
for the most part formal recognitions of the judicial and admin-
istrative changes introduced by Henry the Second. What was
new in it was its origin. In form, like the Charter on which it
was based, it was nothing but a royal grant. In actual fact it
was a treaty between the whole English people and its King. In
it, England found itself for the first time since the Conquest a
nation bound together by common national interests, by a com-
mon national sympathy. In words which almost close the Char-
ter, the "community of the whole land" is recognized as the
great body from which the restraining power of the baronage
takes its validity. There is no distinction of blood or class, of
Norman or not Norman, of noble or not noble.
All are recog-
nized as Englishmen, the rights of all are owned as English
rights. Bishops and nobles claimed and secured at Runnymede
the rights not of baron and churchman only, but those of free-
holder and merchant, of townsman and villein. The provisions
against wrong and extortion which the barons drew up as against
the King for themselves, they drew up as against themselves for
their tenants. Based too as it professed to be on Henry's Char-
ter, it was far from being a mere copy of what had gone before.
The vague expressions of the old Charter were now exchanged
for precise and elaborate provisions. The bonds of unwritten
custom which the older grant did little more than recognize had
proved too weak to hold the Angevins; and the baronage set
them aside for the restraints of written and defined law.
It is in
this way that the Great Charter marks the transition from the
age of traditional rights, preserved in the nation's memory and
officially declared by the Primate, to the age of written legisla-
tion, of parliaments and statutes, which was to come.
Its opening indeed is in general terms. The Church had
shown its power of self-defense in the struggle over the inter-
dict, and the clause which recognized its rights alone retained
the older and general form. But all vagueness ceases when the
Charter passes on to deal with the rights of Englishmen at
large, their right to justice, to security of person and property,
to good government "No freeman," ran a memorable article
that lies at the base of our whole judicial system, "shall be
seized or imprisoned, or dispossessed, or outlawed, or in any way.
brought to ruin; we will not go against any man
nor send
against him, save by legal judgment of his peers or by the law


## p. 6670 (#46) ############################################

6670
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
caru-
of the land. " "To no man will we sell," runs another, "or deny,
or delay, right or justice. " The great reforms of the past reigns
were now formally recognized; judges of assize were to hold
their circuits four times in the year, and the King's court was no
longer to follow the King in his wanderings over the realm, but
to sit in a fixed place. But the denial of justice under John was
a small danger compared with the lawless exactions both of him-
self and his predecessor. Richard had increased the amount of
the scutage which Henry the Second had introduced, and applied
it to raise funds for his ransom. He had restored the Danegeld,
or land-tax, so often abolished, under the new name of «<
cage"; had seized the wool of the Cistercians and the plate of the
churches, and rated movables as well as land. John had again
raised the rate of scutage, and imposed aids, fines, and ransoms
at his pleasure without counsel of the baronage. The Great
Charter met this abuse by a provision on which our constitutional
system rests. "No scutage or aid [other than the three cus-
tomary feudal aids] shall be imposed in our realm save by the
common council of the realm;" and to this Great Council it was
provided that prelates and the greater barons should be sum-
moned by special writ, and all tenants in chief through the sher-
iffs and bailiffs, at least forty days before. The provision defined
what had probably been the common usage of the realm; but the
definition turned it into a national right, a right so momentous
that on it rests our whole Parliamentary life. Even the baron-
age seem to have been startled when they realized the extent of
their claim; and the provision was dropped from the later issue
of the Charter at the outset of the next reign. But the clause
brought home to the nation at large their possession of a right
which became dearer as years went by. More and more clearly
the nation discovered that in these simple words lay the secret
of political power. It was the right of self-taxation that England
fought for under Earl Simon as she fought for it under Hamp-
den. It was the establishment of this right which established
English freedom.


## p. 6671 (#47) ############################################

JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6671
ENGLAND'S GROWTH IN COMMERCE AND COMFORT UNDER
ELIZABETH
From History of the English People'
A rising into importance.
MIDDLE class of wealthier land-owners and merchants was fast
"The wealth of the meaner sort,"
wrote one to Cecil, is the very fount of rebellion, the
occasion of their indolence, of the contempt of the nobility, and
of the hatred they have conceived against them. " But Cecil and
his mistress could watch the upgrowth of national wealth with
cooler eyes.
In the country its effect was to undo much of the
evil which the diminution of small holdings had done. Whatever
social embarrassment it might bring about, the revolution in agri-
culture which Latimer deplored undoubtedly favored production.
Not only was a larger capital brought to bear upon the land, but
the mere change in the system of cultivation introduced a taste
for new and better modes of farming; the breed of horses and of
cattle was improved, and a far greater use made of manure and
dressings. One acre under the new system produced, it was said,
as much as two under the old. As a more careful and constant
cultivation was introduced, a greater number of hands came to
be required on every farm; and much of the surplus labor which
had been flung off the land in the commencement of the new
system was thus recalled to it.
A yet more efficient agency in absorbing the unemployed was
found in the development of manufactures. The linen trade was
as yet of small value, and that of silk-weaving was only just
introduced. But the woolen manufacture was fast becoming an
important element in the national wealth. England no longer
sent her fleeces to be woven in Flanders and to be dyed at
Florence. The spinning of yarn, the weaving, fulling, and dye-
ing of cloth, were spreading rapidly from the towns over the
country-side. The worsted trade, of which Norwich was the cen-
tre, extended over the whole of the Eastern counties. Farmers'
wives began everywhere to spin their wool from their own
sheeps' backs into a coarse "homespun. " The South and the
West, however, still remained the great seats of industry and of
wealth, for they were the homes of mining and manufacturing
activity. The iron manufactures were limited to Kent and
Sussex, though their prosperity in this quarter was already


## p. 6672 (#48) ############################################

6672
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
threatened by the growing scarcity of the wood which fed their
furnaces, and by the exhaustion of the forests of the Weald.
Cornwall was then, as now, the sole exporter of tin; and the
exportation of its copper was just beginning. The broadcloths
of the West claimed the palm among the woolen stuffs of Eng-
land. The Cinque Ports held almost a monopoly of the com-
merce of the Channel. Every little harbor from the Foreland to
the Land's End sent out its fleets of fishing-boats, manned with
bold seamen who were to furnish crews for Drake and the Buc-
caneers. Northern England still lagged far behind the rest of
the realm in its industrial activity. But in the reign of Elizabeth
the poverty and inaction to which it had been doomed for so
many centuries began at last to be broken. We see the first
sign of the revolution which has transferred English manufact-
ures and English wealth to the north of the Mersey and of the
Humber, in the mention which now meets us of the friezes of
Manchester, the coverlets of York, the cutlery of Sheffield, and
the cloth trade of Halifax.
Elizabeth lent a ready patronage to the new commerce; she
shared in its speculations, she considered its extension and pro-
tection as a part of public policy, and she sanctioned the forma-
tion of the great merchant companies which could alone secure
the trader against wrong or injustice in distant countries. The
Merchant-Adventurers of London, a body which had existed long
before, and had received a charter of incorporation under Henry
the Seventh, furnished a model for the Russia Company and the
company which absorbed the new commerce to the Indies. But
it was not wholly with satisfaction that either the Queen or her
ministers watched the social change which wealth was producing
around them. They feared the increased expenditure and com-
fort which necessarily followed it, as likely to impoverish the
land and to eat out the hardihood of the people. "England
spendeth more on wines in one year," complained Cecil, “than it
did in ancient times in four years. >> In the upper classes the
lavishness of a new wealth combined with the lavishness of life,
a love of beauty, of color, of display, to revolutionize English
dress. Men «< wore a manor on their backs. " The Queen's three
thousand robes were rivaled in their bravery by the slashed
velvets, the ruffs, the jeweled purpoints of the courtiers around
her. But signs of the growing wealth were as evident in the
lower class as in the higher. The disuse of salt fish and the


## p. 6673 (#49) ############################################

JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6673
greater consumption of meat marked the improvement which had
taken place among the country folk. Their rough and wattled
farm-houses were being superseded by dwellings of brick and
stone. Pewter was replacing the wooden trenchers of the early
yeomanry, and there were yeomen who could boast of a fair
show of silver plate. It is from this period indeed that we can
first date the rise of a conception which seems to us now a
peculiarly English one,- the conception of domestic comfort. The
chimney-corner, so closely associated with family life, came into
existence with the general introduction of chimneys, a feature
rare in ordinary houses at the beginning of this reign. Pillows,
which had before been despised by the farmer and the trader as
fit only
for women in childbed," were now in general use.
Carpets superseded the filthy flooring of rushes. The loftier
houses of the wealthier merchants, their parapeted fronts and
costly wainscoting, their cumbrous but elaborate beds, their
carved staircases, their quaintly figured gables, not only con-
trasted with the squalor which had till then characterized English
towns, but marked the rise of a new middle class which was to
play its part in later history.
A transformation of an even more striking kind marked the
extinction of the feudal character of the noblesse. Gloomy walls
and serried battlements disappeared from the dwellings of the
gentry. The strength of the mediæval fortress gave way to the
pomp and grace of the Elizabethan hall. Knole, Longleat, Bur-
leigh, and Hatfield, Hardwick, and Audley End, are familiar
instances of a social as well as an architectural change which
covered England with buildings where the thought of defense
was abandoned for that of domestic comfort and refinement. We
still gaze with pleasure on their picturesque line of gables, their
fretted fronts, their gilded turrets and fanciful vanes, their cas-
tellated gateways, the jutting oriels from which the great noble
looked down on his new Italian garden, on its stately terraces
and broad flights of steps, its vases and fountains, its quaint
mazes, its formal walks, its lines of yews cut into grotesque
shapes in hopeless rivalry of the cypress avenues of the South.
Nor was the change less within than without. The life of the
Middle Ages concentrated itself in the vast castle hall, where the
baron looked from his upper daïs on the retainers who gathered
at his board. But the great households were fast breaking up;
and the whole feudal economy disappeared when the lord of
XII-418


## p. 6674 (#50) ############################################

6674
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
the household withdrew with his family into his "parlor" or
"withdrawing-room" and left the hall to his dependants. The
Italian refinement of life which told on pleasance and garden
told on the remodeling of the house within, raised the principal
apartments to an upper floor,-a change to which we owe the
grand staircases of the time,—surrounded the quiet courts by long
galleries of the presence," crowned the rude hearth with huge
chimney-pieces adorned with fauns and Cupids, with quaintly in-
terlaced monograms and fantastic arabesques, hung tapestries on
the walls, and crowded each chamber with quaintly carved chairs
and costly cabinets. The prodigal use of glass became a marked
feature in the domestic architecture of the time, and one whose
influence on the general health of the people can hardly be over-
rated. Long lines of windows stretched over the fronts of the
new manor halls. Every merchant's house had its oriel. "You
shall have sometimes," Lord Bacon grumbled, "your houses so
full of glass that we cannot tell where to come to be out of the
sun or the cold. "
What Elizabeth contributed to this upgrowth of national pros-
perity was the peace and social order from which it sprang.
While autos-da-fé were blazing at Rome and Madrid, while the
Inquisition was driving the sober traders of the Netherlands to
madness, while Scotland was tossing with religious strife, while
the policy of Catharine secured for France but a brief respite
from the horrors of civil war, England remained untroubled and
at peace. Religious order was little disturbed. Recusants were
few. There was little cry as yet for freedom of worship. Free-
dom of conscience was the right of every man. Persecution
had ceased. It was only as the tale of a darker past that men
recalled how, ten years back, heretics had been sent to the fire.
Civil order was even more profound than religious order. The
failure of the northern revolt proved the political tranquillity of
the country. The social troubles from vagrancy and evictions
were slowly passing away. Taxation was light. The country
was firmly and steadily governed. The popular favor which had
met Elizabeth at her accession was growing into a passionate
devotion. Of her faults indeed, England beyond the circle of her
court knew little or nothing. The shiftings of her diplomacy
were never seen outside the royal closet. The nation at large
could only judge her foreign policy by its main outlines, by its
temperance and good sense, and above all by its success. But


## p. 6675 (#51) ############################################

JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6675
every Englishman was able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at
home, in her love of peace, her instinct of order, the firmness
and moderation of her government, the judicious spirit of concil-
iation and compromise among warring factions, which gave the
country an unexampled tranquillity at a time when almost every
other country in Europe was torn with civil war. Every sign of
the growing prosperity, the sight of London as it became the
mart of the world, of stately mansions as they rose on every
manor, told, and justly told, in the Queen's favor. Her statue in
the centre of the London Exchange was a tribute on he part of
the merchant class to the interest with which she watched and
shared personally in its enterprises. Her thrift won a general
gratitude. The memories of the Terror and of the martyrs threw
into bright relief the aversion from bloodshed which was conspic-
uous in her earlier reign, and never wholly wanting through its
fiercer close. Above all, there was a general confidence in her
instinctive knowledge of the national temper. Her finger was
always on the public pulse. She knew exactly when she could
resist the feeling of her people, and when she must give way
before the new sentiment of freedom which her policy uncon-
sciously fostered. But when she retreated, her defeat had all the
grace of victory; and the frankness and unreserve of her surren-
der won back at once the love that her resistance lost. Her
attitude at home, in fact, was that of a woman whose pride in
the well-being of her subjects and whose longing for their favor
was the one warm ou in the coldness of her natural temper.
Elizabeth could be said to love anything, she loved England.
"Nothing," she said to her first Parliament in words of unwonted
fire, "nothing, no worldly thing under the sun, is so dear to me
as the love and good-will of my subjects. " And the love and
good-will which were so dear to her she fully won.
WILLIAM PITT
From History of the English People'
UT of the union of these two strangely contrasted leaders, in
fact, rose the greatest, as it was last, of the purely
Whig administrations. But its real power lay from be-
ginning to end in Pitt himself. Poor as he was,- for his income
was little more than two hundred a year,— and springing as he


## p. 6676 (#52) ############################################

6676
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
did from a family of no political importance, it was by sheer
dint of genius that the young cornet of horse, at whose youth
and inexperience Walpole had sneered, seized a power which the
Whig houses had ever since the Revolution kept in their grasp.
The real significance of his entry into the ministry was that the
national opinion entered with him. He had no strength save
from his "popularity"; but this popularity showed that the polit-
ical torpor of the nation was passing away, and that a new in-
terest in public affairs and a resolve to have weight in them was
becoming felt in the nation at large. It was by the sure instinct
of a great people that this interest and resolve gathered them-
selves round William Pitt. If he was ambitious, his ambition
had no petty aim. "I want to call England," he said, as he
took office, "out of that enervate state in which twenty thousand
men from France can shake her. " His call was soon answered,
He at once breathed his own lofty spirit into the country he
served, as he communicated something of his own grandeur to
the men who served him. "No man," said a soldier of the time,
"ever entered Mr. Pitt's closet who did not feel himself braver
when he came out than when he went in. " Ill combined as
were his earlier expeditions, and many as were his failures, he
roused a temper in the nation at large which made ultimate
defeat impossible. "England has been a long time in labor,”
exclaimed Frederick of Prussia as he recognized a greatness like
his own, "but she has at last brought forth a man. "
It is this personal and solitary grandeur which strikes us most
as we look back to William Pitt. The tone of his speech and
action stands out in utter contrast with the tone of his time. In
the midst of a society critical, polite, indifferent, simple even to
the affectation of simplicity, witty and amusing but absolutely
prosaic, cool of heart and of head, skeptical of virtue and enthu-
siasm, skeptical above all of itself, Pitt stood absolutely alone.
The depth of his conviction, his passionate love for all that he
deemed lofty and true, his fiery energy, his poetic imaginative-
ness, his theatrical airs and rhetoric, his haughty self-assumption,
his pompousness and extravagance, were not more puzzling to
his contemporaries than the confidence with which he appealed to
the higher sentiments of mankind, the scorn with which he
turned from a corruption which had till then been the great
engine of politics, the undoubting faith which he felt in himself,
in the grandeur of his aims, and in his power to carry them out.


## p. 6677 (#53) ############################################

JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6677
"I know that I can save the country," he said to the Duke of
Devonshire on his entry into the ministry, "and I know no other
man can. " The groundwork of Pitt's character was an intense
and passionate pride; but it was a pride which kept him from
stooping to the level of the men who had so long held England
in their hands. He was the first statesman since the Restoration
who set the example of a purely public spirit. Keen as was his
love of power, no man ever refused office so often, or accepted
it with so strict a regard to the principles he professed.
not go to court," he replied to an offer which was made him,
"if I may not bring the Constitution with me. ”
For the corrup-
tion about him he had nothing but disdain. He left to Newcastle
the buying of seats and the purchase of members. At the outset
of his career, Pelham appointed him to the most lucrative office
in his administration, that of Paymaster of the Forces; but its
profits were of an illicit kind, and poor as he was, Pitt refused
to accept one farthing beyond his salary. His pride never ap-
peared in loftier and nobler form than in his attitude towards
the people at large. No leader had ever a wider popularity than
"the great commoner," as Pitt was styled; but his air was always
that of a man who commands popularity, not that of one who
seeks it. He never bent to flatter popular prejudice. When mobs
were roaring themselves hoarse for "Wilkes and liberty," he de-
nounced Wilkes as a worthless profligate; and when all England
went mad in its hatred of the Scots, Pitt haughtily declared his
esteem for a people whose courage he had been the first to enlist
on the side of loyalty. His noble figure, the hawk-like eye which
flashed from the small thin face, his majestic voice, the fire and
grandeur of his eloquence, gave him a sway over the House
of Commons far greater than any other minister has possessed.
He could silence an opponent with a look of scorn, or hush the
whole House with a single word. But he never stooped to the
arts by which men form a political party, and at the height of
his power his personal following hardly numbered half a dozen
members.
His real strength indeed lay not in Parliament, but in the
people at large. His title of "the great commoner" marks a polit-
ical revolution. "It is the people who have sent me here,"
Pitt boasted with a haughty pride when the nobles of the Cab-
inet opposed his will. He was the first to see that the long
political inactivity of the public mind had ceased, and that the


## p. 6678 (#54) ############################################

6678
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
progress of commerce and industry had produced a great middle
class, which no longer found its representatives in the legislature.
"You have taught me," said George the Second when Pitt sought
to save Byng by appealing to the sentiment of Parliament, "to
look for the voice of my people in other places than within the
House of Commons. " It was this unrepresented class which
had forced him into power. During his struggle with Newcastle,
the greater towns backed him with the gift of their freedom
and addresses of confidence. "For weeks," laughs Horace Wal-
pole, "it rained gold boxes. " London stood by him through good
report and evil report; and the wealthiest of English merchants,
Alderman Beckford, was proud to figure as his political lieutenant.
The temper of Pitt indeed harmonized admirably with the
temper of the commercial England which rallied round him, with
its energy, its self-confidence, its pride, its patriotism, its hon-
esty, its moral earnestness. The merchant and the trader were
drawn by a natural attraction to the one statesman of their time
whose aims were unselfish, whose hands were clean, whose life
was pure and full of tender affection for wife and child.
But
there was a far deeper ground for their enthusiastic reverence,
and for the reverence which his country has borne Pitt ever
since. He loved England with an intense and personal love. He
believed in her power, her glory, her public virtue, till England
learned to believe in herself. Her triumphs were his triumphs,
her defeats, his defeats. Her dangers lifted him high above all
thought of self or party spirit. "Be one people," he cried to the
factions who rose to bring about his fall: "forget everything but
the public! I set you the example! " His glowing patriotism
was the real spell by which he held England. But even the
faults which checkered his character told for him with the mid-
dle classes. The Whig statesmen who preceded him had been
men whose pride expressed itself in a marked simplicity and
absence of pretense. Pitt was essentially an actor, dramatic in
the cabinet, in the House, in his very office. He transacted busi-
ness with his clerks in full dress. His letters to his family, gen-
uine as his love for them was, are stilted and unnatural in tone.
It was easy for the wits of his day to jest at his affectation, his
pompous gait, the dramatic appearance which he made on great
debates with his limbs swathed in flannel and his crutch by his
side. Early in life Walpole sneered at him for bringing into the
House of Commons "the gestures and emotions of the stage. "


## p. 6679 (#55) ############################################

JOHN RICHARD GREEN
6679
But the classes to whom Pitt appealed were classes not easily
offended by faults of taste, and saw nothing to laugh at in the
statesman who was borne into the lobby amidst the tortures of
the gout, or carried into the House of Lords to breathe his last
in a protest against national dishonor.
Above all, Pitt wielded the strength of a resistless eloquence.
The power of political speech had been revealed in the stormy.
debates of the Long Parliament, but it was cramped in its utter-
ance by the legal and theological pedantry of the time. Pedantry
was flung off by the age of the Revolution; but in the eloquence
of Somers and his rivals we see ability rather than genius,
knowledge, clearness of expression, precision of thought, the
lucidity of the pleader or the man of business, rather than the
passion of the orator. Of this clearness of statement Pitt had
little or none. He was no ready debater like Walpole, no speaker
of set speeches like Chesterfield. His set speeches were always
his worst, for in these his want of taste, his love of effect, his
trite quotations and extravagant metaphors came at once to the
front. That with defects like these he stood far above every
orator of his time was due above all to his profound conviction,
to the earnestness and sincerity with which he spoke. "I must
sit still," he whispered once to a friend; "for when once I am
up everything that is in my mind comes out. " But the reality of
his eloquence was transfigured by a large and poetic imagination,
an imagination so strong that -as he said himself - "most things.
returned to him with stronger force the second time than the
first, and by a glow of passion which not only raised him high
above the men of his own day, but set him in the front rank
among the orators of the world. The cool reasoning, the wit,
the common-sense of his age made way for a splendid audacity,
a sympathy with popular emotion, a sustained grandeur, a lofty
vehemence, a command over the whole range of human feeling.
He passed without an effort from the most solemn appeal to the
gayest raillery, from the keenest sarcasm to the tenderest pathos.
Every word was driven home by the grand self-consciousness of
the speaker. He spoke always as one having authority. He was
in fact the first English orator whose words were a power,—a
power not over Parliament only, but over the nation at large.
Parliamentary reporting was as yet unknown, and it was only in
detached phrases and half-remembered outbursts that the voice
of Pitt reached beyond the walls of St. Stephen's. But it was
»


## p. 6680 (#56) ############################################

6680
JOHN RICHARD GREEN
especially in these sudden outbursts of inspiration, in these brief
passionate appeals, that the might of his eloquence lay. The few
broken words we have of him stir the same thrill in men of our
day which they stirred in the men of his own.
ATTEMPT ON THE FIVE MEMBERS: PREPARATIONS FOR WAR
From History of the English People'
THE
HE brawls of the two parties, who gave each other the nick-
names of "Roundheads" and "Cavaliers," created fresh
alarm in the Parliament; but Charles persisted in refusing
it a guard. "On the honor of a King," he engaged to defend
them from violence as completely as his own children; but the
answer had hardly been given when his Attorney appeared at
the bar of the Lords and accused Hampden, Pym, Hollis, Strode,
and Haselrig of high treason in their correspondence with the
Scots. A herald-at-arms appeared at the bar of the Commons,
and demanded the surrender of the five members. If Charles
believed himself to be within legal forms, the Commons saw a
mere act of arbitrary violence in a charge which proceeded per-
sonally from the King, which set aside the most cherished privi-
leges of Parliament, and summoned the accused before a tribunal
which had no pretense to a jurisdiction over them. The Com-
mons simply promised to take the demand into consideration, and
again requested a guard. "I will reply to-morrow," said the King.
On the morrow he summoned the gentlemen who clustered
round Whitehall to follow him, and embracing the Queen, prom-
ised her that in an hour he would return master of his kingdom.
A mob of Cavaliers joined him as he left the palace, and remained
in Westminster Hall as Charles, accompanied by his nephew the
Elector Palatine, entered the House of Commons.