er. Neither the Tudor, nor even the Plantagenet
period, could have supplied its special form. The Reformation was a
cardinal factor in its production; and this in more ways than one.

Before that great epoch, the political forces of the country were
represented on the whole by the monarch on one side, and the people on
the other. In the people, setting aside the latent vein of Lollardism,
there was a general homogeneity with respect to all that concerned the
relation of governors and governed. In the deposition of sovereigns, the
resistance to abuses, the establishment of institutions for the defence
of liberty, there were no two parties to divide the land. But, with the
Reformation, a new dualism was sensibly developed among us. Not a
dualism so violent as to break up the national unity, but yet one so
marked and substantial, that thenceforward it was very difficult for any
individual or body of men to represent the entire English character, and
the old balance of its forces. The wrench which severed the Church and
people from the Roman obedience left for domestic settlement thereafter
a tremendous internal question, between the historical and the new,
which in its milder form perplexes us to this day. Except during the
short reign of Edward VI, the civil power, in various methods and
degrees, took what may be termed the traditionary side, and favored the
development of the historical more than the individual aspect of the
national religion. These elements confronted one another during the
reigns of the earlier Stuarts, not only with obstinacy but with
fierceness. There had grown up with the Tudors, from a variety of
causes, a great exaggeration of the idea of royal power; and this
arrived, under James I and Charles I, at a rank maturity. Not less, but
even more masculine and determined, was the converse development. Mr.
Hallam saw, and has said, that at the outbreak of the Great Rebellion,
the old British Constitution was in danger, not from one party but from
both. In that mixed fabric had once been harmonized the ideas, both of
religious duty, and of allegiance as related to it, which were now held
in severance. The hardiest and dominating portion of the American
colonists represented that severance in its extremest form, and had
dropped out of the order of the ideas, which they carried across the
water, all those elements of political Anglicism, which give to
aristocracy in this country a position only second in str