Commonwealth:  nominally a republic, really a dictatorship under Cromwell.  He gave Britain a strong government at home, and made her respected abroad, and laid the foundations of Britain’s foreign trade and colonial empire.

Charles II:  The Restoration:  Reaction in state, church, and society; King striving for absolute power; Nonconformists persecuted; society profligate in its revolt against the strictness of Puritanism; Habeas Corpus Act; Test Act; Plague and Great Fire.

James II:  Revolution of 1688, the death-knell of “divine right”;
Parliament supreme; Declaration of Rights.

William and Mary:  Party government—­Whigs and Tories; King to act by advice of his ministers; each parliament limited to three years; Bill of Rights; Act of Settlement.

Anne:  Marlborough; Union between England and Scotland, 1707; the
Jacobites, 1715 and 1745.

George II:  Walpole, the great peace minister—­home and colonial trade fostered and material wealth of the nation greatly increased; Pitt, the great war minister; territorial expansion in Canada and India—­Wolfe, Clive; the Methodist Movement, Wesley.

George III:  The American Revolution, 1776-83:  loss of the American Colonies; Pitt; Washington; acquisition of Australia by Great Britain, 1788; legislative union of Ireland with Great Britain, 1801; Napoleonic wars; Nelson, Wellington, Aboukir, Trafalgar, and Waterloo; industrial revolution—­the change from an agricultural to an industrial country.

William IV:  Reform Act of 1832, a great forward movement in democratic government; abolition of slavery, 1833; railways and steamships.

Victoria:  First British settlement in New Zealand, 1839; Repeal of the Corn Laws, 1846—­free trade, the commercial policy of England; Elementary Education Act, 1870, education compulsory; parliamentary franchise extended—­vote by ballot; Crimean war; Indian Mutiny; Egypt and the Suez Canal; Boer War—­Orange Free State and South African Republic annexed; social progress.

Edward VII:  Irish Land Act of 1903; pensions for aged labourers; King Edward, “the Peace-maker.”

CIVICS

Taxation—­direct and indirect; how the revenue of the Dominion, provinces, and municipalities, respectively, is collected.

Federal Government—­Governor-general, Senate, House of Commons, Premier, Cabinet.

Imperial Government—­King, House of Lords, House of Commons, Premier, Cabinet.

HISTORY

CHAPTER I

THE AIMS AND STAGES OF STUDY

AIMS

History may be made, in several ways, an important factor in forming intelligent, patriotic citizens: