hroughout the
continent of Europe remained predominantly military in type, and this
fact greatly increased the tendency towards despotism which was
bequeathed by Rome. After the close of the thirteenth century the whole
power of the Church was finally thrown into the scale against the
liberties of the people; and as the result of all these forces combined,
we find that at the time when America was discovered government was
hardening into despotism in all the great countries of Europe except
England. Even in England the tendency towards despotism had begun to
become quite conspicuous after the wholesale slaughter of the great
barons and the confiscation of their estates which took place in the
Wars of the Roses. The constitutional history of England during the
Tudor and Stuart periods is mainly the history of the persistent effort
of the English sovereign to free himself from constitutional checks, as
his brother sovereigns on the continent were doing. But how different
the result! How enormous the political difference between William III.
and Louis XIV., compared with the difference between Henry VIII. and
Francis I.! The close of the seventeenth century, which marks the
culmination of the asiaticizing tendency in Europe, saw despotism both
political and religious firmly established in France and Spain and
Italy, and in half of Germany; while the rest of Germany seemed to have
exhausted itself in the attempt to throw off the incubus. But in England
this same epoch saw freedom both political and religious established on
so firm a foundation as never again to be shaken, never again with
impunity to be threatened, so long as the language of Locke and Milton
and Sydney shall remain a living speech on the lips of men. Now this
wonderful difference between the career of popular liberty in England
and on the Continent was due no doubt to a complicated variety of
causes, one or two of which I have already sought to point out. In my
first lecture I alluded to the curious combination of circumstances
which prevented anything like a severance of interests between the upper
and the lower ranks of society; and something was also said about the
feebleness of the grasp of imperial Rome upon Britain compared with its
grasp upon the continent of Europe. But what I wish now to point
out--since we are looking at the military aspect of the subject--is the
enormous advantage of what we may call the _strategic position_ of
England in the long