the next day with painful forebodings.  The general feeling was in favour of the bill.  It was rumoured that the majority which had determined to stand by the amendments had been swollen by several prelates, by several of the illegitimate sons of Charles the Second, and by several needy and greedy courtiers.  The cry in all the public places of resort was that the nation would be ruined by the three B’s, Bishops, Bastards, and Beggars.  On Wednesday the tenth, at length, the contest came to a decisive issue.  Both Houses were early crowded.  The Lords demanded a conference.  It was held; and Pembroke delivered back to Seymour the bill and the amendments, together with a paper containing a concise, but luminous and forcible, exposition of the grounds on which the Lords conceived themselves to be acting in a constitutional and strictly defensive manner.  This paper was read at the bar; but, whatever effect it may now produce on a dispassionate student of history, it produced none on the thick ranks of country gentlemen.  It was instantly resolved that the bill should again be sent back to the Lords with a peremptory announcement that the Commons’ determination was unalterable.

The Lords again took the amendments into consideration.  During the last forty-eight hours, great exertions had been made in various quarters to avert a complete rupture between the Houses.  The statesmen of the junto were far too wise not to see that it would be madness to continue the struggle longer.  It was indeed necessary, unless the King and the Lords were to be of as little weight in the State as in 1648, unless the House of Commons was not merely to exercise a general control over the government, but to be, as in the days of the Rump, itself the whole government, the sole legislative chamber, the fountain from which were to flow all those favours which had hitherto been in the gift of the Crown, that a determined stand should be made.  But, in order that such a stand might be successful, the ground must be carefully selected; for a defeat might be fatal.  The Lords must wait for some occasion on which their privileges would be bound up with the privileges of all Englishmen, for some occasion on which the constituent bodies would, if an appeal were made to them, disavow the acts of the representative body; and this was not such an occasion.  The enlightened and large minded few considered tacking as a practice so pernicious that it would be justified only by an emergency which would justify a resort to physical force.  But, in the many, tacking, when employed for a popular end, excited little or no disapprobation.  The public, which seldom troubles itself with nice distinctions, could not be made to understand that the question at issue was any other than this, whether a sum which was vulgarly estimated at millions, and which undoubtedly amounted to some hundreds of thousands, should be employed in paying the debts of the state and alleviating the load of taxation, or in making Dutchmen, who were