nate votes of supply; but the final judgment on all questions of law respecting property rested with the house of lords. The same cast of aristocracy, intermingled with popularity, pervaded the systems of education. From climate, compact population, and sober national character, England was capable beyond any other country in the world of a system of popular education. Nevertheless, it had none. The mass of its people was left ignorant how to read or write. 1763. But the benevolence of Catholic ages, emulated also in later times, had benefited science by endowments, which in their conception were charity schools, founded by piety for the education of poor men's sons; where a place might sometimes be awarded to favor, but advancement could be obtained only by merit, and the sons of the aristocracy, having no seminaries of their own, grouped themselves, as at Eton or Westminster or Harrow or Winchester, round the body of the scholars on the foundation; submitting like them to the accustomed discipline, even to the use of the rod, at which none rebelled, since it fell alike on all. The same constitution marked the universities. The best scholars on the foundation were elected from the public schools to the scholarships in the several colleges; and formed the central influence of industry, order, and ambition, round which the sons of the opulent clustered. Thus the genius of the past claimed the right to linger in the streets of mediæval Oxford; and the sentiment of loyalty, as in earlier days, still hovered over the meadows of Christ Church and the walks of Maudlin; but, if the two universities were both loyal to the throne and devoted to the church, it was from their own free choice, and not from deference to authority or command. They had proved their independence and had resisted kings. If they were swayed on the surface by ministerial influences, they were at heart intractable and self-determined. The king could neither appoint their officers nor prescribe their studies, nor control their government nor administer their funds. The endowments of the colleges, which, in their origin, were the gifts of piety and charity, were held as property, independent of the state; and were as sacred as the estates of any one of the landed gentry. The sons of the aristocracy might sometimes be prize-men at Oxford or wranglers at Cambridge ; but, if they won collegiate honors, it was done fairly by merit alone. In the pursuit, the eldest sons of 1763. peers stood on no vantage-ground over the humblest commoner; so that the universities in their whole organization upheld the institutions of England, and found in them the security of their own privileges. It might be supposed that the gates of the cities would have been barred against the influence of the aristocracy; but it was not so. That influence was interwoven with the prosperity of the towns. Entails were not perpetual; land was always in the market; estates were often encumbered; and the national debt, which was intimately connected with all private credit and commercial transactions, was in fact a mortgage upon all the soil of the kingdom. The swelling expenses of the government increased its dependence on the moneyed class; and the leading minister needed the confidence of the city as well as of the country and the court. Besides, it was not uncommon to see a wealthy citizen toiling to amass yet greater wealth, that he might purchase land and found a family; or giving his richly dowered daughter in marriage to a peer. Everybody formed a part of the aristocratic organization: a few desired to enter the higher class; the rest sought fortune in serving it. Moreover, the interests of the trade of the nation had precedence of the political interests of the princes. The members of the legislature watched popular excitements, and listened readily to the petitions of the merchants; and these, in their turn, did not desire to see one of their own number charged with the conduct of the finances as chancellor of the exchequer, but wished rather for some member of the aristocracy, friendly to their interests. They preferred to speak through such a one, and rebelled against the necessity of doing so as little as they did at the employment of a barrister to plead their cause in the halls of justice. But, if aristocracy was not excluded from towns, still more 1763. did it pervade the rural life of England. The climate was not only softened by the milder atmosphere that belongs to the western side of masses of land, but was further modified by the proximity of every part of it to the sea. It knew neither long continuing heat nor cold; and was more friendly to daily employment throughout the whole year, within doors or without, than any in Europe. The island was "a little world" of its own, with a "happy breed of men" for its inhabitants, in whom the hardihood of the Norman was intermixed with the gentler qualities of the Celt and the Saxon, just as nails are rubbed into steel to temper and harden the Damascus blade. They loved country life, of which the mildness of the clime increased the charms; since every grass and flower and tree that had its home between the remote north and the neighborhood of the tropics would live abroad, and, such only excepted as needed a hot sun to unfold their bloom or fix their aroma or ripen their fruit, would thrive in perfection: so that no region could show such a varied wood. The moisture of the sky favored a soil not naturally very rich, and clothed the earth in perpetual verdure. Nature had its attractions even in winter. The ancient trees were stripped indeed of their foliage, but showed more clearly their fine proportions and the undisturbed nests of the noisy rooks among their boughs; the air was so mild that the flocks and herds still grazed on the freshly springing herbage; and the deer found shelter enough by crouching amongst the fern; the smoothly shaven grassy walk was soft and yielding under the foot; nor was there a month in the year in which the plough was idle. The large landed proprietors dwelt often in houses which had descended to them from the times when England was gemmed all over with the most delicate and most solid structures of Gothic art. Estates were bounded by the same hedges and ditches, counties by the same lanes, as in William the Conqueror's time; and water-wheels revolved to grind corn just where they had been doing so for at least eight hundred years. Hospitality had its traditions; and for untold centuries Christmas had been the most joyous of the seasons. The system was so completely the ruling element in English history and English life, especially in the country, that it seemed the most natural organization of society, and was even endeared to the dependent people. Hence the manners of the aristocracy, without haughtiness or arrogance, implied rather than expressed the consciousness of undisputed rank; and female beauty added to its loveliness the blended graces of dignity and humility. 1763. Yet the privileged class defended its rural pleasures and its agricultural interests with vigilance. The life of the farmer from generation to generation was but "an equal conflict between industry and want;" and the laboring poor, "with all their thrift and ingenious parsimony," could not thrive. The game laws, parcelling out among the large proprietors the exclusive right of hunting, which had been wrested from the king as too grievous a prerogative, were maintained with relentless severity; and to steal or even to hamstring a sheep was as much punished by death as murder or treason. During the reign of George II., sixtythree new capital offences had been added to the criminal laws, and five new ones, on the average, continued to be discovered annually; so that the criminal code of England, formed under the influence of the rural gentry, was written in blood, and owed its mitigation only to executive clemency. But this cruelty, while it encouraged and hardened of fenders, did not revolt the instinct of submission in the rural population. The tenantry, holding lands at a moderate rent, for the most part without permanent leases, transmitting the occupation of them from father to son through many generations, clung to the lord of the manor as ivy to massive old walls. They loved to live in his light; to lean on his support; to gather round him with affectionate deference rather than base cowering; and, by their faithful attachment, to win his sympathy and care, happy when he was such a one as merited their love. They caught refinement of their superiors, so that their cottages were carefully neat, with roses and honeysuckles clambering to their roofs. They cultivated the soil in sight of the towers of the church 1763. round which reposed the ashes of their ancestors for almost a thousand years. The whole island was mapped out into territorial parishes, as well as into counties; and the affairs of local interest, the assessment of rates, the care of the poor and of the roads, were intrusted to elected vestries or magistrates, with little interference from the central government. The resident magistrates were unpaid, being taken from among the landed gentry; and the local affairs of the county, and all criminal prosecutions of no uncom mon importance, were settled by them in a body at quarterly sessions, where a kind-hearted landlord often presided, to appall the convict by the earnestness of his rebuke, and then to show him mercy by a lenient sentence. All judg ments were controlled by fixed law; and, at the assizes, no sentence could be pronounced against the accused but by the consent of impartial men taken from the body of the people. Thus the local institutions of England shared the common character: they were at once the evidence of aristoc racy and the badges of liberty. The climate, so inviting to rural life, was benign also to industry of all sorts. Nowhere could labor apply itself so steadily, or in the same time achieve so much; and it might seem that the population engaged in manufactures would have constituted a separate element not included within the aristocratic system, but the great manufacture of the material not produced at home was still in its infancy. The weaver toiled in his own cottage, and the thread which he used was with difficulty supplied to him sufficiently by the spinners at the wheel of his own family and among his neighbors. Men had not as yet learned by machinery to produce, continuously and uniformly, from the down of cotton, the porous cords of parallel filaments; to attenuate them by gently drawing them out; to twist and extend the threads; and to wind them regularly on pins of wood as fast as they are spun. In 1763, the inconsiderable cotton manufactures of Great Britain, transported from place to place on pack-horses, did not form one two-hundredth part of the production of ninety years later, and were politically |