and religious established on so firm a foundation as never again to be shaken, never again with impunity to be threatened, so long as the language of Locke and Milton and Sydney shall remain a living speech on the lips of men.  Now this wonderful difference between the career of popular liberty in England and on the Continent was due no doubt to a complicated variety of causes, one or two of which I have already sought to point out.  In my first lecture I alluded to the curious combination of circumstances which prevented anything like a severance of interests between the upper and the lower ranks of society; and something was also said about the feebleness of the grasp of imperial Rome upon Britain compared with its grasp upon the continent of Europe.  But what I wish now to point out—­since we are looking at the military aspect of the subject—­is the enormous advantage of what we may call the strategic position of England in the long mediaeval struggle between civilization and barbarism.  In Professor Stubbs’s admirable collection of charters and documents illustrative of English history, we read that “on the 6th of July [1264] the whole force of the country was summoned to London for the 3d of August, to resist the army which was coming from France under the queen and her son Edmund. The invading fleet was prevented by the weather from sailing until too late in the season....  The papal legate, Guy Foulquois, who soon after became Clement IV., threatened the barons with excommunication, but the bull containing the sentence was taken by the men of Dover as soon as it arrived, and was thrown into the sea.” [15] As I read this, I think of the sturdy men of Connecticut, beating the drum to prevent the reading of the royal order of James II. depriving the colony of the control of its own militia, and feel with pride that the indomitable spirit of English liberty is alike indomitable in every land where men of English race have set their feet as masters.  But as the success of Americans in withstanding the unconstitutional pretensions of the crown was greatly favoured by the barrier of the ocean, so the success of Englishmen in defying the enemies of their freedom has no doubt been greatly favoured by the barrier of the British channel.  The war between Henry III. and the barons was an event in English history no less critical than the war between Charles I. and the parliament four centuries later; and British and Americans alike have every reason to be thankful that a great French army was not able to get across the channel in August, 1264.  Nor was this the only time when the insular position of England did goodly service in maintaining its liberties and its internal peace.  We cannot forget how Lord Howard of Effingham, aided also by the weather, defeated the armada that boasted itself “invincible,” sent to strangle freedom in its chosen home by the most execrable and ruthless tyrant that Europe has ever seen, a tyrant whose victory would have meant