tender regard for the Constitution, and how much it was concerned in taking up the thread of it 'where it was snapped at the Wars of the Roses,' it extorted from the King's necessities, and his desire of saving Strafford, an Act to provide that neither House should be adjourned except at their own order, or Parliament be dissolved except by Act of Parliament.'

On its subsequent proceedings we need not insist. There was not a single arbitrary act which it had condemned in the King that it did not imitate and outdo. It may be questioned whether if Charles had gained the victory he would have overthrown the Constitution; unfortunately there is no room for that doubt in the history of the Long Parliament. Charles met the close of his unfortunate career with dignity, and has rooted in the minds of Englishmen a feeling of personal loyalty to the Sovereign which all Englishmen acknowledge, whatever be their politics. The Long Parliament, unable to maintain its own dignity and the freedom of the people, sunk in a universal hiss of ignominy and contempt.

But the culminating injustice of Mr. Green's book will be found in his treatment of George III. He cannot find words strong enough to express his fixed and rooted aversion for a Sovereign, whose main fault it was, in the eyes of his political enemies, that he wished to restore something like the equilibrium of parties, set aside by his predecessors, and to rescue the nation from a narrow and permanent oligarchy. Mr. Green admits that even the best of the Whigs, with Rockingham and Burke at their head, were unfavourable to all schemes of Reform.2 They shrunk, he asserts, from all sympathy with public opinion. At a time when it had become all-powerful in the State, when Government hung simply on its will, the House of Commons had ceased in any real and

2 Short History, p. 751.

ESSAY II.

HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH PEOPLE.

MICHIGA

We stay

effective sense to represent the Commons at all.'3 not to inquire under what party or by whose agency this country had been reduced to a condition so disastrous. For nearly half a century the Whigs had monopolised place and power; and never in the history of England, not even in the reign of Charles II., had the arts of corruption been more actively or unscrupulously plied. Never had it been more unblushingly avowed that honesty and patriotism were mere names for venality. Under any circumstances it was not desirable that such a state of things should continue; nor would they have existed at all, or certainly not in such excess, had there been an Opposition to criticise and resist the 'hoary jobbers' represented by Newcastle, or the haughty intimidations of a ruling oligarchy. If then George III. had had no higher object in view than that of airing himself in the character which Bolingbroke had invented of a Patriotic King,' as Mr. Green contemptuously declares-even if he had had no higher purpose than to break up a vicious system which had led to such fatal results, George III. would have deserved the thanks of his people.

6

But Mr. Green cannot see or acknowledge any good in any act or motive whatever of George III. For the first and last time,' he observes, since the accession of the House of Hanover, England saw a King who was resolved to play a part in English politics; and the part which George III. succeeded in playing was undoubtedly a memorable one. In ten years he reduced government to a shadow, and turned the loyalty of his subjects into disaffection. In twenty he had forced the colonies of America into revolt and independence, and brought England to the brink of ruin.' And further on, in reference to the accession of Lord North to office, Mr. Green does not scruple to say: 'George was, in fact, sole minister during the eight years which followed; and the 3 Short History, p. 743. Ibid. p. 740.

shame of the darkest hour of English history lies wholly at his door.' 5

Is this the language, we ask, which a thoughtful historian, writing for young readers, would feel that he was justified in employing? Is it such as can be with safety commended to inexperienced judgments? To our sense nothing can be more extravagant, or unbecoming. Mr. Green writes not like a grave historian, but as a partisan of Wilkes, Beckford, and Junius-as if he had been poaching on their preserves for the choicest flowers of violent and vulgar rhetoric. To answer these and other accusations in detail would be quite beyond the question. If George III. was the vain, selfish, unscrupulous tyrant he is described by Mr. Green, how is it that the longer he reigned the more was he beloved by his subjects? How is it that when dynasties were falling, and revolutions were subverting all other thrones, the throne of George III. stood safer and securer every hour? How is it that, in spite of his youth and inexperience, in spite of the numerous difficulties he had to encounter at the outset, his government became at every decade more firm, more steady, and more acceptable to his subjects? How is it that he lived down the bitter, factious, and unscrupulous opposition of a party who had resolved to dictate to him what ministers he should choose and what measures he should follow, until, not merely the House of Commons, as Mr. Green insinuates, but the people at large rallied round the King and withdrew all confidence from his opponents? Every fresh historical investigation has lightened the load of malignant aspersions once resting on his memory. Nobody now, except Mr. Green, believes in Burke's Thoughts on the present Discontents,' or accepts, as an accurate statement of facts, his theory of an interior cabinet of the King's friends.' No one now thinks that this clever but unscrupulous calumny was anything

5 Short History, p. 749.

better than a party invention to conceal the incapacity of the Whigs and their mutual recriminations. It is not true that George III. in ten years reduced government to a shadow, even on Mr. Green's own showing; for with all the array of talent against him, with the Stamp Act and other measures. hostile to the American colonists bequeathed to him by the Whigs, Lord North's administration, though not free from mistakes, defied all attempts to shake it. Equally untrue is it that the King forced the American colonists into revolt. That revolt was the result of causes over which the King had no control. It would have come under any circumstances. Was the King to allow the claim of Independence? Was he to submit without a struggle to the dismemberment of the Empire-for America was as much a part of the Empire as Scotland or as Ireland? That, at all events, was not the opinion of the nation, not of Chatham, not of Burke, not of Rockingham, not of Bedford. What would Mr. Green have? The right of the mother country to tax the colonies had always been insisted on, though not enforced. It was asserted by all parties alike, however divergent their political opinions. In deference to the will of the nation the King was bound to assert that right when it was called in question on the other side of the Atlantic. Whatever might be his private opinions he could do no otherwise; for that he acted from a sense of duty and not wholly from inclination is now very well known. Burke might argue that it was inexpedient to press the right, but the clearer judgment of men in general saw that the question could not be so decided. It was a right that we claimed, and as a right it was denied; and it was nobler for this country, and for America itself, that it should be so, and that by Lord North's reduction of the tax to a nominal sum the baser motives of gain should not demoralise or confuse the question. As to Mr. Green's remark that by this tax the nation was brought to the brink of ruin, he is only

airing himself as a poet or epigrammatist. The statement is mere nonsense. The War of Independence, measured even by its material results, was not less advantageous to us than it was to our colonists. Instead of diminishing it augmented our prosperity.

6

We cannot spare room for further criticism, or we should be inclined to protest against Mr. Green's tirade that, it is touching even now to listen to such an appeal of reason and of culture against the tide of dogmatism which was soon to flood Christendom with Augsburg Confessions, and Creeds of Pope Pius, and Westminster Confessions, and Thirty-nine Articles.' Nor can we dwell, as we had intended, upon his singular hostility to the Church of England. But we cannot forbear noticing his strange assertion that the Church of England alone, among all the religious bodies of Western Christendom, has failed through two hundred years to devise a single new service of prayer or praise." If that remark be intended to apply to the public services of the Church of England, we are not inclined to accept it as any condemnation. But if it is to be taken in its largest sense, if Mr. Green includes in it devotional services for the use of families or individuals, or of praise in the sense of hymnology, he has forgotten Ken, Wilson, Keble, and a score of others.

Upon inaccuracies in detail we have not insisted, prejudicial as such inaccuracies must be in a manual intended for schools, for it is not to be expected that in so wide a subject they could be altogether avoided. Our objections are of a graver and more general kind. It is against the whole. tone and teaching of the book that we feel ourselves called upon most emphatically to protest. Under the disguise of a school history, Mr. Green has disseminated some very violent opinions in politics and religion. His design is not Short History, p. 307. ? Ibid. p. 610.