way to colossal empire. Here was the auspicious moment to balance prerogative and privilege. Wise men saw the propitious hour. The states-general was convoked in the time of John of Valois. This assembly and the tumultuous multitude sought to gain some chartered rights, as the barons, a century and a half before, did from John of England. Alas, that they lacked the indomitable perseverance to achieve them! In this constitutional crisis of France despotism triumphed. But the spirit of liberty is immortal. It renewed its contest with prerogative in succeeding reigns, always defeated, till Charles VII., made conqueror by the immortal frenzy of Joan d'Arc in the hour of victory and uncautious thanksgiving, stole from France its last safeguard of constitutional freedom. He established an army, maintained by a perpetual tax, irrespective of any legislative assembly. This army, thus maintained, was all that tyranny could ask. Liberty called for arms. A war for the public good, as it was called, followed in the reign of Louis XI. Proving victor, he found fresh occasion for the further restriction of liberty, and greater exercise of despotic power. Here ends the constitutional struggle. A few words on the development of the system.

Reacting from feudalism, the ruling policy of the sixteenth century was to enlarge the national territory, irrespective of natural boundaries, affinities of peoples, or commercial relations. Charles VIII., Louis XII., Francis I., and Henry II., all descended into Italy. Charles V., of Germany and Spain, and Philip II., were not slow to follow such illustrious examples. Poor unhappy Italy, first leaguing herself with one and then the other, shifting desperately to make her two enemies fight each other, spoiled by both, reaped, both in property and character, all the degrading results of duplicity and intrigue. Meanwhile for this great end of foreign spoil every resource of internal advantage was neglected. The increase of population went to renew armies, the produce of the arts to sustain them. The spirit of the people was made warlike, military fame the only proper ambition. Every interest of the people was neglected, every possible tax imposed, and every interest of the country misdirected or repressed. For empires of heterogeneous masses must be agglomerated, despite the depopulation and waste of the original kingdom by the effort of conquest and the imi

nent peril of civil war among elements so admirably adapted to that end.

This very result, civil war, followed. Always most fierce and sanguinary, this was intensified in horror by being fired with religious fanaticism, till on a given signal, by the connivance and active participation of all the nobles, priests, and best men of the kingdom, seventy thousand were murdered; neighbors, friends, relatives myrdered without the maddening strife of war! Sanctioned by public authority, urged by the chief men of the nation, defended from Rome, approved by the priests as acceptable to heaven, this horrid holocaust was offered, not in expiation of previous crime, but an evidence of deep, damning depravity beyond name. Even when this was done, unshocked by the crime, the Romish clergy formed a league for the utter extirpation of the Protestants and the management of the king. Meanwhile the blazing auto de fes of Philip II. in Spain, and the thirty years' religious war in Germany, gave small assurance of better things for man in Europe. The close of these wars in France brings us within two monarchs, or sixty years of Louis XIV. How much improvement was made under these Bourbon kings we will now examine.

Henry IV., the first of the house of Bourbon, was a Protestant. But let us not suspect that religious names had any relation to religion. Married to a Catholic seven days before the massacre of St. Bartholomew, he saved his life by apostasy from his nominal faith. He came to the throne by the murder of the Duke of Guise and Henry III., and by the second abjuration of Protestantism; established himself by years of internal war, passed his life in the grossest licentiousness, a slave to the passion for gambling, and died by the dagger of Ravaillac.

That the internal condition of France could improve under such a monarch shows the desperate state of her previous fortunes. But while agriculture was developed, commerce and art encouraged, and toleration promulgated by the edict of Nantes, no permanent good, no security for the rights of men, no bulwark against future tyranny or amelioration of the present, no advance in the constitution of the kingdom was achieved. The only item in the Constitution that had any relation to preserving the rights of men was that Parliament held the right to register the edicts of the king. How ready these supple bodies

were to do the king's pleasure may be seen by the following characterization of them from the Henriade of Voltaire: "Inefficient assemblies, where laws were proposed rather than executed, and where abuses were detailed with eloquence, but not remedied."

Things went from bad to worse under Louis XIII., who, after a childless marriage of twenty-two years, having been reconciled to his hated queen by her deception, became the father of Louis XIV.

Louis XIV. announced his whole policy in a single line, L'état c'est moi, a sentiment adjudged blasphemous by all the sacred laws of civil society. His reign was splendid, but it was with that splendor peculiarly appreciable in France, foreign conquest and elegant debauchery. For the first the state of Europe was peculiarly favorable; for the second there never was any lack of opportunity or disposition in France. Charles II. of England was bribed, and made to declare war against his tried allies. Spain was weakened by dissensions among her widely-scattered, ill-compacted kingdoms; Germany torn by civil wars; Holland wasted by attempts to conquer Brazil, and at the same time consumed as to her vitals by internal strife. Then the great central power of Louis XIV. was wielded against the broken nationalities, and towns, fortresses, principalities were gathered as a reaper gathers grain. But as time passed on things changed in England, and when there was no power on the continent that could stay the vaulting ambition of the French monarch, the islands of the sea put themselves in his path, to vindicate the interests of man or be crushed by the colossal Juggernaut of power.

Much as Louis had succeeded for himself and France, he had made nothing secure. No constitutional bulwark restricted the unbounded abuse of power by himself or any succeeding king. No habeas corpus act existed. No trial by jury was guaranteed. France was not a monarchy tempered by a constitution and legislative assemblies. It was a despotism that could be tempered only by revolution and assassination. No tide of influence could flood up from the ruled to the ruler, except when the last fiber of endurance snapped seas of human beings surged round the uncaring author of their woes, either to be trampled down by armies or ruined afresh by revolution. That

government that takes away responsibility from the ruled is destructive of the best powers of man: powers that can be developed only in those whom God made to be responsible agents. When man has none of the rights of man committed to his care his soul narrows to the grasping, withering care of self. Better be a peasant in a republic than a courtier under despotism.

The social state of the kingdom was loathsome. The king had many children by his wife, more by his mistresses, Montespan alone bearing him six. Nations change their policy by some imminent foreign danger or evident domestic advantage. Louis changed his when he changed mistresses, and by their friends whom they brought into power. So that when the royal favor meant crime, and in any proper society would have meant infamy, it was eagerly sought by ladies of high rank; for, obtaining it, they obtained not the dalliance of the monarch's leisure hours alone, but some control of the nation's destinies. Masterly statesmen eagerly urged the prostitution of near female relatives, that by their shame, then accounted honor, they might gather influence and reins of power. Whoever sees the fruits of these things in the succeeding reign will thank God that the destinies of the race were not longer periled by the unchecked prevalence of such a system of government.

Turn now to the preparations for man's good in the department of government. The nation that chiefly contended that fateful field of Blenheim against France had a far different training, arrived at a far different result. Commencing in a union of different races, in itself almost a pledge of success, it abolished the domination of one race over another, and quickly added the abolition of the right of man to property in man. From her earliest history three unbreachable barriers have been held against the encroachments of kingly power. The fight over these has been desperate at times. Some tyrants have forced a momentary passage, only to receive terrible punishment for their headlong temerity. This triple line of defenses kept human rights secure, namely, the king could not legislate without consent of Parliament; could not tax the people without the action of their representatives, and was bound to conduct his executive in conformity with the laws on peril of his throne or head.

All the limited monarchies of the continent became absolute in the middle ages because of the seeming necessity of standing armies. These must be wielded by the king, and hence he becomes independent. The insular position of England saved her the necessity of such an army, until the people had learned that they held over the king a power greater than he over them. For if he held power, they held its origin and continuance, the purse.

In 1215 that charter of the rights of the governed, then and in all ages deservedly called Great, was obtained. At that early time human rights were made more sacred in England than they have become in many other monarchies even yet. Not that England obtained in the thirteenth century a perfect constitution, but from such splendid beginnings she has maintained freedom, liberty, and a measure of equal justice to an extent unknown in any other country. Freedom of speech obtained in spite of the efforts of Henry IV. and Elizabeth to prevent it. After many hard contests, productive of mutual respect, England and Scotland united their fortunes, to the obvious advantage of both. King Charles I. attempted to wring from the people their ancient chartered rights, but had speedily wrung from him the enlargement and reiteration of that charter. Disregarding this, the Long Parliament, having first put its own existence beyond the pleasure or displeasure of the king, enacted that a Parliament should assemble every three years, at the king's call or without it. It abolished his inquisitions, called Star Chamber and High Commission; impeached and imprisoned his ministers, righted wrongs with a vigorous hand, and when the king proved hypocritical, treacherous, and tyrannous, removed the trouble by removing his head. The unequaled grandeur of the act lies in the fact that it was done by law, and not by revolution or murder. Popular right surpassed kingly might.

Then arose the Commonwealth, in which every right was safe at home, and those of distant unknown peoples extorted from unwilling hands.

Proverbially untractable as kings are, Charles II. and James II. sought to do the very things that had cost the life of the father of the one and was about to cost the crown of the other. Revolution followed, and William of Orange, fresh from the