excesses; for they had in reserve a check which soon brought the
fiercest and proudest king to reason, the check of physical
force. It is difficult for an Englishman of the nineteenth
century to imagine to himself the facility and rapidity with
which, four hundred years ago, this check was applied. The people
have long unlearned the use of arms. The art of war has been
carried to a perfection unknown to former ages; and the knowledge
of that art is confined to a particular class. A hundred thousand
soldiers, well disciplined and commanded, will keep down ten
millions of ploughmen and artisans. A few regiments of household
troops are sufficient to overawe all the discontented spirits of
a large capital. In the meantime the effect of the constant
progress of wealth has been to make insurrection far more
terrible to thinking men than maladministration. Immense sums
have been expended on works which, if a rebellion broke out,
might perish in a few hours. The mass of movable wealth collected
in the shops and warehouses of London alone exceeds five
hundredfold that which the whole island contained in the days of
the Plantagenets; and, if the government were subverted by
physical force, all this movable wealth would be exposed to
imminent risk of spoliation and destruction. Still greater would
be the risk to public credit, on which thousands of families
directly depend for subsistence, and with which the credit of the
whole commercial world is inseparably connected. It is no
exaggeration to say that a civil war of a week on English ground
would now produce disasters which would be felt from the Hoang-ho
to the Missouri, and of which the traces would be discernible at
the distance of a century. In such a state of society resistance
must be regarded as a cure more desperate than almost any malady
which can afflict the state. In the middle ages, on the contrary,