the animosity of those factions did not really arise from the
dispute about the succession it lasted long after all ground of
dispute about the succession was removed. The party of the Red
Rose survived the last prince who claimed the crown in right of
Henry the Fourth. The party of the White Rose survived the
marriage of Richmond and Elizabeth. Left without chiefs who had
any decent show of right, the adherents of Lancaster rallied
round a line of bastards, and the adherents of York set up a
succession of impostors. When, at length, many aspiring nobles
had perished on the field of battle or by the hands of the
executioner, when many illustrious houses had disappeared forever
from history, when those great families which remained had been
exhausted and sobered by calamities, it was universally
acknowledged that the claims of all the contending Plantagenets
were united in the house of Tudor.

Meanwhile a change was proceeding infinitely more momentous than
the acquisition or loss of any province, than the rise or fall of
any dynasty. Slavery and the evils by which slavery is everywhere
accompanied were fast disappearing.

It is remarkable that the two greatest and most salutary social
revolutions which have taken place in England, that revolution
which, in the thirteenth century, put an end to the tyranny of
nation over nation, and that revolution which, a few generations
later, put an end to the property of man in man, were silently
and imperceptibly effected. They struck contemporary observers
with no surprise, and have received from historians a very scanty
measure of attention. They were brought about neither by
legislative regulations nor by physical force. Moral causes