were different in temper and in destiny. The States General, practically
a new creation, neither knew what powers to claim or how to vindicate
them. They turned the power of the purse to little or no account; they
discredited themselves in the eyes of the nation by giving proofs of
feebleness and indecision in the first great crisis with which they were
called to deal, the interregnum of anarchy and conspiracy that ensued
upon the capture of King John at Poitiers (1356). The result was that
the States General, occasionally summoned to endorse the policy or
register the decrees of the monarchy, remained an ornamental feature of
the French constitution. In England, on the other hand, the Commons
accepted the position of auxiliaries to the superior Estates in their
contests with the Crown; and the new Parliament pursued the aims and the
tactics of the old Great Council, with all the advantages conferred by
an exclusive right to grant taxation. For more than two hundred years it
was a popular assembly in form and in pretension alone. The most active
members of the Lower House were drawn from the lower ranks of the
territorial aristocracy; and the Commons were bold in their demands only
when they could attack the prerogative behind the shield of a faction
quartered in the House of Lords. But the alliance of the Houses
transformed the character of English politics. Before Parliament had
been in existence for two centuries, it had deposed five kings and
conferred a legal title upon three new dynasties; it had indicated to
posterity the lines upon which an absolutism could be fought and ruined
without civil war; and it had proved that the representative element in
the constitution might overrule both monarchy and aristocracy, if it had
the courage to carry accepted principles to their logical conclusion.

Even in England a medieval Parliament was scarcely a legislature in our
sense of the word. Legislation of a permanent and general kind was an
occasional expedient. New laws were usually made in answer to the