of the King enabled Burke nobly to restate and amply to revivify the principles of 1688.  Chatham meanwhile had stumbled upon a vaster empire; and the industrial system which his effort quickened could not live under an economic regime which still bore traces of the narrow nationalism of the Tudors.  No man was so emphatically representative of his epoch as Adam Smith; and no thinker has ever stated in such generous terms the answer of his time to the most vital of its questions.  The answer, indeed, like all good answers, revealed rather the difficulty of the problem than the prospect of its solution; though nothing so clearly heralded the new age that was coming than his repudiation of the past in terms of a real appreciation of it.  The American War and the two great revolutions brought a new race of thinkers into being.  The French seed at last produced its harvest.  Bentham absorbed the purpose of Rousseau even while he rejected his methods.  For a time, indeed, the heat and dust of war obscured the issue that Bentham raised.  But the certainties of the future lay on his side.

CHAPTER II

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

I

The English Revolution was in the main a protest against the attempt of James II to establish a despotism in alliance with France and Rome.  It was almost entirely a movement of the aristocracy, and, for the most part, it was aristocratic opposition that it encountered.  What it did was to make for ever impossible the thought of reunion with Rome and the theory that the throne could be established on any other basis than the consent of Parliament.  For no one could pretend that William of Orange ruled by Divine Right.  The scrupulous shrank from proclaiming the deposition of James; and the fiction that he had abdicated was not calculated to deceive even the warmest of William’s adherents.  An unconstitutional Parliament thereupon declared the throne vacant; and after much negotiation William and Mary were invited to occupy it.  To William the invitation was irresistible.  It gave him the assistance of the first maritime power in Europe against the imperialism of Louis XIV.  It ensured the survival of Protestantism against the encroachments of an enemy who never slumbered.  Nor did England find the new regime unwelcome.  Every widespread conviction of her people had been wantonly outraged by the blundering stupidity of James.  If a large fraction of the English Church held aloof from the new order on technical grounds, the commercial classes gave it their warm support; and many who doubted in theory submitted in practice.  All at least were conscious that a new era had dawned.

For William had come over with a definite purpose in view.  James had wrought havoc with what the Civil Wars had made the essence of the English constitution; and it had become important to define in set terms the conditions upon which the life of kings must in the future be regulated.  The reign of William is nothing so much as the period of that definition; and the fortunate discovery was made of the mechanisms whereby its translation into practice might be secured.  The Bill of Rights (1689) and the Act of Settlement (1701) are the foundation-stones of the modern constitutional system.