of no importance. Not yet had art done more than begin the construction of channels for still-water navigation; not yet had Wedgwood fully succeeded in changing, annually, tens of thousands of tons of clay and flint into brilliantly glazed and durable ware, capable of sustaining heat, cheap in price, and beautiful and convenient in form; not yet had the mechanics of England, after using up its forests, learned familiarly to smelt iron with pit coal, or to drive machinery by steam.

1763.

Let the great artificers of England in iron and clay adopt science as their patron; let the cotton-spinners, deriving their raw material from abroad, perfect their manufacture by inventive plebeian genius, and so prosper as to gather around their mills a crowded population, and there will then exist a powerful and opulent and numerous class, emancipated from aristocratic influence, thriving independently outside of the old society of England. But at that time the great manufactures of the realm were those of wool and the various preparations from sheepskins and hides, far exceeding in value all others of all kinds put together; and for these the land-owner furnished all the raw material, so that his prosperity was bound up in that of the manufacturer. The manufacture of wool was cherished as the most valuable of all. It had grown with the growth and wealth of England, and flourished in every part of the island; at Kidderminster and Wilton and Norwich, not less than in the West Riding of York. It had. been privileged by King Stephen and regulated by the lion-hearted Richard. Its protection was as much a part of the statute-book as the game laws, and was older than Magna Charta itself. To foster it was an ancient custom of the country, coeval with the English constitution; and it was so interwoven. with the condition of life in England that it seemed to form an intimate dependency of the aristocracy. The landowner, whose rich lawns produced the fleece, sympathized with the industry that wrought it into beautiful fabrics. Mutual confidence was established between the classes of society; no chasm divided its orders.

Thus unity of character marked the constitution and the

social life of England. The sum of the whole was an intense nationality in its people. They were happy in their form of government, and were justly proud of it; for they enjoyed more perfect freedom than the world up to that time had known. In spite of the glaring defects of their system, Greece, in the days of Pericles or Phocion, had not been blessed with such liberty. Italy, in the fairest days of her ill-starred republics, had not had such security of property and person, so pure an administration of justice, such unlicensed expression of thought.

These benefits were held by a firm tenure, safe against revolutions and sudden changes in the state. The laws reigned, and not men; and the laws had been the growth of centuries, yielding to amendment only by the gradual method of nature, when opinions exercising less instant influence should slowly infuse themselves through the pub lic mind into legislation: so that the constitution of England, though like all things else perpetually changing, changed like the style of architecture along the aisles of its own cathedrals, where the ponderous severity of the Norman age melts in the next almost imperceptibly, into the more genial pointed arch and the seemingly lighter sheaf of columns, yet without sacrificing the stately majesty of the proportions or the massive durability of the pile.

1763.

With all the defects which remained in the form of their constitution, the English felt that they were great not by restraining laws, not by monopoly, but by liberty and labor. Liberty was the cry of them all; and every opposition, from whatever selfish origin it might spring, took this type, always demanding more than even a liberal gov ernment would concede. Liberty and industry gave Englishmen their nationality and greatness, and a feeling of superiority over every other nation. The Frenchman loved France, and, when away from it, longed to return to it, as the only country where life could be thoroughly enjoyed. The German, in whom the sentiment of his native soil was enfeebled by its divisions into so many states and sovereignties, gained enlargement in his sphere of vision, and at home had a curiosity for all learning; away from home,

had eyes for every thing. The Englishman, wherever he travelled, was environed by an English atmosphere. He saw the world abroad as if to perceive how inferior it was to the land of his birth. The English statesmen, going from the classical schools to the universities, brought up in a narrow circle of classical and mathematical learning, with no philosophical training or acquaintance with general principles, travelled as Englishmen. They went young to the house of commons; and were so blinded by admiration of their own country that they thought nothing blameworthy which promoted its glory, its power, or its welfare. They looked out upon the surrounding sea as their wall of defence, and the great deep seemed to them their inheritance, inviting them everywhere to enter upon it as their rightful domain. They gazed beyond the Atlantic; and, not content with their own colonies, they counted themselves defrauded of their due as the sole representatives of liberty, so long as Spain should hold exclusively such boundless em- 1763. pires. Especially to them the house of Bourbon was

an adder, that might be struck at whenever it should rear its head. To promote British interests and command the applause of the British senate, they were ready to infringe on the rights of other countries, and even on those of the outlying dominions of the crown.

1763.

CHAPTER IV.

ENGLAND AND ITS DEPENDENCIES CONTINUed.

1763.

So England was one united nation. The landed aristocracy was the sovereign, was the legislature, was the people, was the state. The separate influence of each of the great component parts of English society may be observed in the British dominions outside of Great Britain.

From the wrecks of the empire of the Great Mogul, a monopolizing company of English merchants had gained dominion in the east; with factories, subject provinces, and territorial revenues on the coast of Malabar, in the Carnatic, and on the Ganges. They despised the rivalry of France, whose East India company was hopelessly ruined, and whose feeble factories were in a state of confessed inferiority; and, as they pushed forward their victories, they avowed gain to be the sole end of their alliances and their trade, of their warfare and their civil rule.

In America, the middling class, chiefly rural people, with a few from the towns of England, had founded colonies in the forms of liberty, and themselves owned and cultivated the soil.

Ireland, whose government was proposed as a model for the British colonies, and whose history is from this time. intimately connected with the course of events in America, had been seized by the English oligarchy. Half as large as England, it has a still milder climate and a more fertile soil. From its wild mountains in the west gushed numerous rivers, fed by the rains which the sea breeze made frequent. These, now halting in bogs and morasses, now expanding

into beautiful lakes, now rushing with copious volume and swift descent, offered along their courses water-power without limit, and at their outlets deep and safe harbors. The limestone plains under the cloudy sky were matted with luxuriant grasses, whose verdure vied with the emerald.

Centuries before the Christian era, the beautiful region had been occupied by men of the same Celtic tribe which colonized the highlands of Scotland. The Normans, who in the eighth century planted commercial towns on its seacoast, were too few to maintain separate municipalities. The old inhabitants had been converted to Christianity by apostles of the purest fame, and the land abounded in churches and cathedrals, in a learned, liberal, and numerous clergy. Their civil government was an aristocratic confederacy of septs, or families, and their respective chiefs; and 1763. the remote land seemed set apart by nature as the safe abode of an opulent, united, and happy people.

In the reign of Henry II. of England, and in his name, English barons and adventurers invaded Ireland; and, before the end of the thirteenth century, its soil was parcelled out among ten English families.

As the occupation became confirmed, the English system of laws was continued to the English colonists living within the pale which comprised the four counties of Dublin, Louth, Meath, and Kildare. In the Irish parliament, framed ostensibly after the model of the English constitution, no Irishman could hold a seat: it represented the intruders only, who had come to possess themselves of the lands of the natives, now quarrelling among themselves about the spoils, now rebelling against England, but always united against the Irish.

When Magna Charta was granted at Runnymede, it be came equally the possession and birthright of the Norman inhabitants of Ireland; but to the "mere Irish" its benefits were not extended, except by special charters of enfranchisement or denization, of which the sale furnished a means of exaction.

The oligarchy of conquerors, in the process of time, began to amalgamate with the Irish; they had the same religion;