their unpopularity would have passed to their successors, who would have grievously disappointed vulgar expectation, and would have been under the necessity of eating their own words in every debate.  The league between the Tories and the discontented Whigs would have been dissolved; and it is probable that, in a session or two, the public voice would have loudly demanded the recall of the best Keeper of the Great Seal, and of the best First Lord of the Treasury, the oldest man living could remember.

But these lessons, the fruits of the experience of five generations, had never been taught to the politicians of the seventeenth century.  Notions imbibed before the Revolution still kept possession of the public mind.  Not even Somers, the foremost man of his age in civil wisdom, thought it strange that one party should be in possession of the executive administration while the other predominated in the legislature.  Thus, at the beginning of 1699, there ceased to be a ministry; and years elapsed before the servants of the Crown and the representatives of the people were again joined in an union as harmonious as that which had existed from the general election of 1695 to the general election of 1698.  The anarchy lasted, with some short intervals of composedness, till the general election of 1765.  No portion of our parliamentary history is less pleasing or more instructive.  It will be seen that the House of Commons became altogether ungovernable, abused its gigantic power with unjust and insolent caprice, browbeat King and Lords, the Courts of Common Law and the Constituent bodies, violated rights guaranteed by the Great Charter, and at length made itself so odious that the people were glad to take shelter, under the protection of the throne and of the hereditary aristocracy, from the tyranny of the assembly which had been chosen by themselves.

The evil which had brought on so much discredit on representative institutions was of gradual though of rapid growth, and did not, in the first session of the Parliament of 1698, take the most alarming form.  The lead of the House of Commons had, however, entirely passed away from Montague, who was still the first minister of finance, to the chiefs of the turbulent and discordant opposition.  Among those chiefs the most powerful was Harley, who, while almost constantly acting with the Tories and High Churchmen, continued to use, on occasions cunningly selected, the political and religious phraseology which he had learned in his youth among the Roundheads.  He thus, while high in the esteem of the country gentlemen and even of his hereditary enemies, the country parsons, retained a portion of the favour with which he and his ancestors had long been regarded by Whigs and Nonconformists.  He was therefore peculiarly well qualified to act as mediator between the two sections of the majority.

The bill for the disbanding of the army passed with little opposition through the House till it reached the last stage.  Then, at length, a stand was made, but in vain.  Vernon wrote the next day to Shrewsbury that the ministers had had a division which they need not be ashamed of; for that they had mustered a hundred and fifty-four against two hundred and twenty-one.  Such a division would not be considered as matter of boast by a Secretary of State in our time.