that there is as much to be said on one side as on the other. Froude
replied to The Edinburgh Review in Fraser's Magazine for September,
1858, and in the following month the reviewer retorted. He did not
really shake the foundation of Froude's case, which was the same as
Luther's. Luther, like Froude, was no democrat. To both of them the
Reformation was a protest against ecclesiastical tyranny, or for
spiritual freedom. "The comedy has ended in a marriage," said
Erasmus of Luther and Luther's wife. It was not a comedy, and it had
not ended.

Froude sometimes goes too far. When he defends the Boiling Act,
under which human beings were actually boiled alive in Smithfield,
he shakes confidence in his judgment. He sets too much value upon
the verdicts of Henry's tribunals, forgetting Macaulay's emphatic
declaration that State trials before 1688 were murder under the
forms of law. Although the subject of his Prize Essay at Oxford was
"The Influence of the Science of Political Economy upon the Moral
and Social Welfare of a Nation," he never to the end of his life
understood what political economy was. Misled by Carlyle, he
conceived it to be a sort of "Gospel," a rival system to the
Christian religion, instead of useful generalisations from the
observed course of trade. He never got rid of the idea that
Governments could fix the rate of wages and the price of goods. A
more serious fault found by The Edinburgh reviewer, the ablest of
all Froude's critics, was the implication rather than the assertion
that Henry VIII.'s Parliaments represented the people. The House of
Commons in the sixteenth century was really chosen through the
Sheriffs by the Crown, and the preambles of the Statutes, upon which
Froude relied as evidence of contemporary opinion, showed the
opinion of the Government rather than the opinion of the people.