easily as it had crushed
Royalty. It was national opinion which restored the Stuarts; and no
sooner did the Stuarts cross its will than it threatened their throne in
the Popish Plot and swept them from the country in the Revolution. The
stubborn purpose of William wrestled in vain with its turns of
sentiment; even the genius of Marlborough proved helpless in a contest
with it. It was indeed irresistible whenever it acted. But as yet it
acted only by spurts. It had no wish to interfere with the general
course of administration or policy; in the bulk of the nation indeed
there was neither the political knowledge nor the sustained interest in
politics which could have prompted such an interference. It was only at
critical moments, when great interests were at stake, interests which it
could understand and on which its mind was made up, that the nation
roused itself and "shook its mighty mane." The reign of the Stuarts
indeed did much to create a more general and continuous attention to
public affairs. In the strife of the Exclusion Bill and in the Popish
Plot Shaftesbury taught how to "agitate" opinion, how to rouse this
lagging attention, this dormant energy of the people at large; and his
opponents learned the art from him. The common statement that our two
great modern parties, the Whig and the Tory, date from the Petitioners
and Abhorrers of the Exclusion Bill is true only in this sense, that
then for the first time the masses of the people were stirred to a more
prolonged and organized action in co-operation with the smaller groups
of professed politicians than they had ever been stirred to before.

[Sidenote: Becomes powerless.]

The Revolution of 1688 was the crowning triumph of this public opinion.
But for the time it seemed a suicidal triumph. At the moment when the
national will claimed to be omnipotent, the nation found itself helpless
to carry out its will. In making the revolution it had meant to
vindicate English freedom and English Protestantism from the attacks of
the Crown. But it had never meant to bring about any radical change in
the system under which the Crown had governed England or under which the
Church had been supreme over English religion. The England of the
Revolution was little less Tory in feeling than the England of the
Restoration; it had no dislike whatever to a large exercise of
administrative power by the sovereign, while it was stubbornly averse
from Nonconformity or the toleration of