he genial rationalism of the
time, coupled with the political affiliations of the High Church party,
combined to give Hoadly the victory; but his opponents, and Law
especially, remained to be the parents of a movement for ecclesiastical
freedom of which it has been the good fortune of Oxford to supply in
each succeeding century the leaders. America presented again the problem
of consent in the special perspective of the imperial relation; and the
decision which grew out of the blundering obscurantism of the King
enabled Burke nobly to restate and amply to revivify the principles of
1688. Chatham meanwhile had stumbled upon a vaster empire; and the
industrial system which his effort quickened could not live under an
economic regime which still bore traces of the narrow nationalism of the
Tudors. No man was so emphatically representative of his epoch as Adam
Smith; and no thinker has ever stated in such generous terms the answer
of his time to the most vital of its questions. The answer, indeed, like
all good answers, revealed rather the difficulty of the problem than the
prospect of its solution; though nothing so clearly heralded the new age
that was coming than his repudiation of the past in terms of a real
appreciation of it. The American War and the two great revolutions
brought a new race of thinkers into being. The French seed at last
produced its harvest. Bentham absorbed the purpose of Rousseau even
while he rejected his methods. For a time, indeed, the heat and dust of
war obscured the issue that Bentham raised. But the certainties of the
future lay on his side.

CHAPTER II

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE REVOLUTION

I

The English Revolution was in the main a protest against the attempt of
James II to establish a despotism in alliance with France and Rome. It
was almost entirely a movement of the aristocracy, and, for the most
part, it was aristocratic opposition that it encountered. What it did
was to make for ever impossible the thought of reunion with Rome and the
theory that the throne could be established on any other basis than the
consent of Parliament. For no one could pretend that William of Orange
ruled by Divine Right. The scrupulous shrank from proclaiming the
deposition of James; and the fiction that he had abdicated was not
calculated to deceive even the warmest of William's adherents. An
unconstitutional Parliament thereupon declared the throne vacant; and
after much negotiation William a