s of wealth
has been to make insurrection far more terrible to thinking men than
maladministration. Immense sums have been expended on works which, if
a rebellion broke out, might perish in a few hours. The mass of movable
wealth collected in the shops and warehouses of London alone exceeds
five hundredfold that which the whole island contained in the days of
the Plantagenets; and, if the government were subverted by physical
force, all this movable wealth would be exposed to imminent risk of
spoliation and destruction. Still greater would be the risk to public
credit, on which thousands of families directly depend for subsistence,
and with which the credit of the whole commercial world is inseparably
connected. It is no exaggeration to say that a civil war of a week on
English ground would now produce disasters which would be felt from the
Hoang-ho to the Missouri, and of which the traces would be discernible
at the distance of a century. In such a state of society resistance must
be regarded as a cure more desperate than almost any malady which can
afflict the state. In the middle ages, on the contrary, resistance was
an ordinary remedy for political distempers, a remedy which was always
at hand, and which, though doubtless sharp at the moment, produced no
deep or lasting ill effects. If a popular chief raised his standard in
a popular cause, an irregular army could be assembled in a day. Regular
army there was none. Every man had a slight tincture of soldiership,
and scarcely any man more than a slight tincture. The national wealth
consisted chiefly in flocks and herds, in the harvest of the year, and
in the simple buildings inhabited by the people. All the furniture, the
stock of shops, the machinery which could be found in the realm was of
less value than the property which some single parishes now contain.
Manufactures were rude; credit was almost unknown. Society, therefore,
recovered from the shock as soon as the actual conflict was over. The
calamities of civil war were confined to the slaughter on the field of
battle, and to a few subsequent executions and confiscations. In a week
the peasant was driving his team and the esquire flying his hawks over
the field of Towton or of Bosworth, as if no extraordinary event had
interrupted the regular course of human life.

More than a hundred and sixty years have now elapsed since the English
people have by force subverted a government. During the hundred and
sixty yea