indispensable to the dignity, and even to the safety, of the
French and Castilian monarchies. If either of those two powers
had disarmed, it would soon have been compelled to submit to the
dictation of the other. But England, protected by the sea against
invasion, and rarely engaged in warlike operations on the
Continent, was not, as yet, under the necessity of employing
regular troops. The sixteenth century, the seventeenth century,
found her still without a standing army. At the commencement of
the seventeenth century political science had made considerable
progress. The fate of the Spanish Cortes and of the French States
General had given solemn warning to our Parliaments; and our
Parliaments, fully aware of the nature and magnitude of the
danger, adopted, in good time, a system of tactics which, after a
contest protracted through three generations, was at length
successful

Almost every writer who has treated of that contest has been
desirous to show that his own party was the party which was
struggling to preserve the old constitution unaltered. The truth
however is that the old constitution could not be preserved
unaltered. A law, beyond the control of human wisdom, had decreed
that there should no longer be governments of that peculiar class
which, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, had been common
throughout Europe. The question, therefore, was not whether our
polity should undergo a change, but what the nature of the change
should be. The introduction of a new and mighty force had
disturbed the old equilibrium, and had turned one limited
monarchy after another into an absolute monarchy. What had
happened elsewhere would assuredly have happened here, unless the
balance had been redressed by a great transfer of power from the