LETTER IX.--ON THE GOVERNMENT


That mixture in the English Government, that harmony between King, Lords,
and commons, did not always subsist. England was enslaved for a long
series of years by the Romans, the Saxons, the Danes, and the French
successively. William the Conqueror particularly, ruled them with a rod
of iron. He disposed as absolutely of the lives and fortunes of his
conquered subjects as an eastern monarch; and forbade, upon pain of
death, the English either fire or candle in their houses after eight
o'clock; whether was this to prevent their nocturnal meetings, or only to
try, by an odd and whimsical prohibition, how far it was possible for one
man to extend his power over his fellow-creatures. It is true, indeed,
that the English had Parliaments before and after William the Conqueror,
and they boast of them, as though these assemblies then called
Parliaments, composed of ecclesiastical tyrants and of plunderers
entitled barons, had been the guardians of the public liberty and
happiness.

The barbarians who came from the shores of the Baltic, and settled in the
rest of Europe, brought with them the form of government called States or
Parliaments, about which so much noise is made, and which are so little
understood. Kings, indeed, were not absolute in those days; but then the
people were more wretched upon that very account, and more completely
enslaved. The chiefs of these savages, who had laid waste France, Italy,
Spain, and England, made themselves monarchs. Their generals divided
among themselves the several countries they had conquered, whence sprung
those margraves, those peers, those barons, those petty tyrants, who