s, and ultimately, by the Act of Settlement, placed the crown in
the gift of the people. But it neither introduced nor determined any
important principle, and, that both parties might be able to work
together, it left untouched the fundamental question between Whig and
Tory. For the divine right of kings it established, in the words of
Defoe, the divine right of freeholders; and their domination extended
for seventy years, under the authority of John Locke, the philosopher of
government by the gentry. Even Hume did not enlarge the bounds of his
ideas; and his narrow materialistic belief in the connection between
liberty and property captivated even the bolder mind of Fox.

By his idea that the powers of government ought to be divided according
to their nature, and not according to the division of classes, which
Montesquieu took up and developed with consummate talent, Locke is the
originator of the long reign of English institutions in foreign lands.
And his doctrine of resistance, or, as he finally termed it, the appeal
to Heaven, ruled the judgment of Chatham at a moment of solemn
transition in the history of the world. Our Parliamentary system,
managed by the great revolution families, was a contrivance by which
electors were compelled, and legislators were induced to vote against
their convictions; and the intimidation of the constituencies was
rewarded by the corruption of their representatives. About the year 1770
things had been brought back, by indirect ways, nearly to the condition
which the Revolution had been designed to remedy for ever. Europe seemed
incapable of becoming the home of free States. It was from America that
the plain ideas that men ought to mind their own business, and that the
nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State,--ideas long
locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin
folios,--burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined
to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man. Whether the British
legislature had a constitutional right to tax a subject colony was hard
to say, by the letter of the law. The general presumption was immense on
the side of authority; and the world believed that the will of the
constituted ruler ought to be supreme, and not the will of the subject
people. Very few bold writers went so far as to say that lawful power
may be resisted in cases of extreme necessity. But the colonisers of
America, who had gone forth