e case a
century ago.]

These features of the English Constitution are so prominent since the
reform of Parliament in 1832 as to be generally recognized. They have
been gradually becoming its essential features ever since the Revolution
of 1688. Before that time the crown had really been the executive, and
there had really been a separation between the executive and legislative
branches of the government, which on several occasions, and notably in
the middle of the seventeenth century, had led to armed strife. What the
Revolution of 1688 really decided was that henceforth in England the
executive was to be the mighty arm of the legislature, and not a
separate and rival power. It ended whatever of reality there was in the
old system of King, Lords, and Commons, and by the time of Sir Robert
Walpole the system of cabinet government had become fairly established;
but men still continued to use the phrases and formulas bequeathed from
former ages, so that the meaning of the changes going on under their
very eyes was obscured. There was also a great historical incident,
after Walpole's time, which served further to obscure the meaning of
these changes, especially to Americans. From 1760 to 1784, by means of
the rotten borough system of elections and the peculiar attitude of
political parties, the king contrived to make his will felt in the
House of Commons to such an extent that it became possible to speak of
the personal government of George III. The work of the Revolution of
1688 was not really completed till the election of 1784 which made Pitt
the ruler of England, and its fruits cannot be said to have been fully
secured till 1832. Now as our Revolutionary War was brought on by the
attempts of George III. to establish his personal government, and as it
was actually he rather than Lord North who ruled England during that
war, it was not strange that Americans, even of the highest education,
should have failed to discover the transformation which the past century
had wrought in the framework of the English government. Nay, more,
during this century the king had seemed even more of a real institution
to the Americans than to the British. He had seemed to them the only
link which bound the different parts of the empire together. Throughout
the struggles which culminated in the War of Independence, it had been
the favourite American theory that while the colonial assemblies and the
British Parliament were sovereign each in it