is the logical outcome of the principles of liberty and the notion of
a higher law above municipal codes and constitutions, with which
Whiggism began.

It is the supreme achievement of Englishmen, and their bequest to the
nations; but the patriarchs of the doctrine were the most infamous of
men. They set up the monument to perpetuate the belief that the
Catholics set fire to London. They invented the Black Box and the
marriage of Lucy Waters. They prompted, encouraged, and rewarded the
murderer Oates. They proclaimed that the Prince of Wales came in the
warming pan. They were associated with the Rye House assassins; that
conspiracy was their ruin. Charles triumphed, and did not spare his
enemies. When he died, in spite of the Dover Treaty, of his paid
subserviency to France, of the deliberate scheme to subvert the
liberties of England, James, the chief culprit, succeeded, with
undiminished power. The prostrate Whigs were at the mercy of
Jeffreys.

But forty years of agitation had produced the leaven that has leavened
the world. The revolutionary system was saved, because the king threw
away his advantage. The Whig party became supreme in the State by a
series of events which are the most significant in English History.


XIII

THE ENGLISH REVOLUTION

THREE-QUARTERS of a century of struggling and experiment, from the
fall of Bacon to the death of Charles II, had ended in failure, and