the peace of Westphalia. Into this life
England was rapidly sinking, from the reign of Anne.

But the visitation came at last, at once to punish and to stimulate.
France, Germany, and England were plunged into war together; and fearful
as the plunge was, out of that raging torrent the three nations have
struggled to shore, refreshed and invigorated by the struggle. England
seems now to be entering on another career, more perilous than the
exigencies of war--a moral and intellectual conflict, in which popular
passions and rational principles will be ranged on opposite sides; and
the question may involve the final shape which government shall assume
in the British empire, or, perhaps, in the European world.

The characteristics of our time are wholly unshared with the past. In
calling up the recollections of the great ages of English change, we can
discover but slight evidence of their connexion with our own. To the
stately, but religious, aspect of the Republic of 1641, we find no
resemblance in the general features of our religious tolerance. To the
ardent zeal for liberty which marked the Revolution of 1688, we can find
no counterpart in the constitutional quietude of the present day. The
fiery ferocity of Continental Revolution has certainly furnished no
model to the professors of national regeneration, since the reform of
1830. And yet, a determination, a power and a progress of public change,
is now the acknowledged principle of the most active, indefatigable, and
unscrupulous portion of the mind of England.

And among the most remarkable and most menacing adjuncts of the crisis,
is the singular sense of inadequacy to resist its career, which seems to
paralyse the habitual defenders of the right cause. The consecrated
guardians of the church seem only to wait the final blow. The great
landholders in the peerage are contented with making protests. The
agricultural interest, the boast of England, and the vital interest of
the empire, has abandoned a resistance, too feeble to deserve the praise
of fortitude, and too irregular to deserve the fruits of victory. The
moneyed interest sees its gigantic opulence threatened by a
hundred-handed grasp; but makes no defence, or makes that most dangerous
of all defences, which calls in the invader as the auxiliary, bribes him
with a portion of the spoils, and only provokes his appetite for the
possession of the whole.

This condition of things cannot last. A few years, perhap