of 1688 if George III had not denied its principles.  When he enforced the resignation of the elder Pitt the theories at once of Edmund Burke and English radicalism were born; for the Present Discontents and the Society for the Support of the Bill of Rights are the dawn of a splendid recovery.  And they made possible the speculative ferment which showed that England was at last awake to the meaning of Montesquieu and Rousseau.  Just as the shock of the Lancastrian wars produced the Tudor despotism, so did the turmoil of civil strife produce the complacency of the eighteenth century.  But the peace of the Tudors was the death-bed of the Stuarts; and it was the stagnant optimism of the early eighteenth century which made possible the birth of democratic England.

The atmosphere of the time, in fact, is deep-rooted in the conditions of the past.  Locke could not have written had not Hobbes and Filmer defended in set terms the ideal of despotic government.  He announced the advent of the modern system of parliamentary government; and from his time the debate has been rather of the conditions under which it is to work, than of the foundations upon which it is based.  Burke, for example, wrote what constitutes the supreme analysis of the statesman’s art.  Adam Smith discussed in what fashion the prosperity of peoples could be best advanced.  From Locke, that is to say, the subject of discussion is rather politik than staatslehre.  The great debate inaugurated by the Reformation ceased when Locke had outlined an intelligible basis for parliamentary government.  Hume, Bolingbroke, Burke, are all of them concerned with the detail of political arrangement in a fashion which presupposes the acceptance of a basis previously known.  Burke, indeed, toward the latter part of his life, awoke to the realization that men were dissatisfied with the traditional substance of the State.  But he met the new desires with hate instead of understanding, and the Napoleonic wars drove the current of democratic opinion underground.  Hall and Owen and Hodgskin inherited the thoughts of Ogilvie and Spence and Paine; and if they did not give them substance, at least they gave them form for a later time.

Nor is the reason for this preoccupation far to seek.  The advance of English politics in the preceding two centuries was mainly an advance of structure; yet relative at least to continental fact, it appeared liberal enough to hide the disharmonies of its inner content.  The King was still a mighty influence.  The power of the aristocracy was hardly broken until the Reform Bill of 1867.  The Church continued to dominate the political aspect of English religious life until, after 1832, new elements alien from her ideals were introduced into the House of Commons.  The conditions of change lay implicit in the Industrial Revolution, when a new class of men attained control of the nation’s economic power.  Only then was a realignment of political forces essential.  Only then, that is to say, had the time arrived for a new theory of the State.