ace, in Great Britain alone, is a
history of the growth of Opinion and of the People.

Charles's efforts to overthrow the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, and
to enforce Episcopacy, brought on the war with the stern enthusiasts of
that country. Laud, in the Church, and the Earl of Strafford, in the
Cabinet, kept the King in a constant passion of royal and ecclesiastical
power. Strafford fell, and the civil war broke out. Cromwell towered up
suddenly, on the bloody field, and was victorious over the royalists.
The King perished on the scaffold. Cromwell became Lord Protector. Anon,
the commonwealth fell; the Stuarts were restored, and Charles II
ascended the throne;--but amid all these perilous acts of political and
religious fury, the world of thought had been stirred by the speeches
and writings, of Taylor, Algernon Sydney, Hampden, and Milton. As the
people gradually felt their power they learned to know their rights,
and, although they went back from Republicanism to Royalty, they did so,
perhaps, only to save themselves from the anarchy that ever threatens a
nation while freeing itself from feudal traditions.

Besides these political and literary phases of the time, there had been
added to the Catholic, Episcopal, and Puritan sects, a _new_ element of
religious power, which was destined to produce a slow but safe
revolution among men.

An humble shoemaker, named GEORGE FOX, arose and taught that "every man
was complete in himself; he stood in need of no alien help; the light
was free of all control,--above all authority external to itself. Each
human being, man or woman, was supreme." The christian denomination
called Quakers, or more descriptively--"Friends,"--- thus obtained a
hearing and a standing among all serious persons who thought Religion a
thing of life as well as of death.

Quakerism, with such fundamental principles of equality in constant
practice, became a social polity. If the Quaker was a Democrat, he was
so because the "inner light" of his christianity made him one, and he
dared not disobey his christianity. He recognized no superiors, for his
conscience taught him to deny any privileges to claimed superiority. But
the Quaker added to his system, an element which, hitherto, was unknown
in the history of sects;--he was a Man of Peace. It is not to be
supposed that any royal or ecclesiastical government would allow such
radical doctrines to pass unnoticed, in the midst of a society which was
ever