possessed by the Tories during the greater part of the reign of Charles the Second, and the manner in which it was employed, not only to prepetuate every existing form of servitude, but to demolish the most valued provisions of liberty, are sufficiently indicated in the conduct of that party on the matter of the non-resisting test. In a session of parliament in Oxford in 1666, an attempt was made to pass a bill which would have imposed the oath of non-resistance upon the whole nation. Even this measure was lost by three voices only, and those from three members who made their appearance in the house for the first time on that day. But the grand struggle on this question was in 1675. In that year a bill was brought into the upper house by the government, which contained the nonresistance oath, and also an oath to oppose any attempt to alter the constitution in Church or State. These oaths were to be exacted from all clergymen, schoolmasters, and officers of state, from all persons holding office in corporations, and from the members of both houses of parliament. The debates on this iniquitous bill lasted seventeen days, often extending to an unusually late hour in the evening, sometimes until midnight. Charles himself made his appearance in the house day after day, taking his place by the fireside as a listener. In the end, the measure was carried in its most obnoxious form. It had been thought, that the Tory strength in the Commons might be sufficient to sustain such a bill even there; but the bold topics of argument which the debate in the Lords had elicited, were such as had not been listened to in that house since the early days of the Long Parliament-and in consequence it was not deemed advisable to push the matter further. This affair is only one in the lengthened series, demonstrating that if Englishmen are not slaves, they owe it to the weakness of Toryism, and not to its strength, to the want of potency in its arm, and not to any want of the servile in its temperament. Our liberties are no boon from by-gone Toryism, but a possession wrested from its hard grasp by men capable of painful watchings, severe labors, and resistance-even unto blood, in the cause of far other principles.

The conduct of the seven bishops in refusing to lend themselves to the cause of false religion, as they deemed it, at the bidding of the king, was much to their honor. But much more to their dishonor, and to the dishonor of the clergy generally, was the manner in which they had employed themselves for a long time past in filling all the pulpits of the kingdom with their doctrine as to the duty of passive obedience. To resist the supreme magistrate, in any case, was to sin mortally. Was not this to encourage the king in those arbitrary courses, to which, as every man knew, his inclinations so strongly tended? Was it not in effect to

tell him, that there was neither law nor usage with which he might not dispense with impunity? Was not this to give license to the oppressor, by placing the heaviest chain on the oppressed? Was not this to degrade religion from her place as the friend of humanity and freedom, and to make her a mere tool to be wielded at pleasure by the cruel and despotic?

During the new flow and excitement of the popular feeling connected with the revolution, the Tories, lay and ecclesiastical, were comparatively silent. But with the change of the sovereignty-no trivial shock to Tory notions-came the no less difficult matters for that party to digest contained in the Declaration of Rights and the Bill of Rights. In these documents, all the great points of civil freedom, in favor of which so much had been written, and done, and endured through the last fifty years, were distinctly exhibited, recognized, and established. But what Tory could fail to see that by this course of affairs the very principles which he had been so long accustomed to denounce as those of the 'great rebellion,' and as the absolutely treasonable tenets of Whiggism, had become the law of the land: while the professors of those tenets had the prospect of acting for no small interval as the principal advisers of the crown. Hence came settled disaffection, and the difficulties which embittered the reign of William the Third, and cramped his generous policy.

But the Whigs soon fell from the exclusive favor of the new sovereign. Their misfortune, however, in this respect, was their honor. They hazarded the displeasure of the crown, but it was on a point deeply affecting the permanent liberties of the people. This point was, in their appropriation of the supplies, as an annual grant, which since that period has given the House of Commons so powerful a control over the executive, as to render it impossible that any government should stand without the suffrage of that assembly.

But whether in office or out of office, the Whigs were the steady friends of the new king; while not a few of their opponents were imploring the return of the late monarch, and anticipating from such a prince, restored by means of thirty thousand French bayonets, a more just government than they were subject to under William! The detection of a Jacobite conspiracy to cut off the king by assassination, filled the land with indignation, and operated as so great a discouragement to the disaffected, that their policy underwent some change. But the change was not such as to mend the reputation of Toryism. The policy of the party now was, to annoy where they could not hope to subdue. To distress a constitutional king, if they could not bring back a legitimate one. To become even champions of freedom, but only that its immunities might be turned

against itself. Thus if they favored the measures of the Whigs designed to give increased power to the Commons in regard to the government, it was mainly because they hated the man in possession of the throne, and the principles which had given him possession of it still more; and if they concurred in deliberations to soften the law of treason, it was at a moment when their own connexions were the parties on whom the severities of that law were most likely to fall. The improvements in regard to the law of treason passed in 1695, and such was their novel clemency, that Burnet described the Bill as intended to make men as safe as possible in all treasonable practices. How would the Tory faction have stared if one of their fraternity had proposed while Russell and Sydney were perishing under the barbarous influence of this law, that something should be forthwith done to render it more just, humane, and favorable to the accused? We have seen that it is by acts of a very different complexion that Toryism has been concerned to signalize the day of its power. Magnanimity of this sort is not at all to its taste. In regard to the vital question-the liberty of the press, a similar combination of Whigs and Tories took place, and for the same reasons. Hitherto all writings tending to possess the people with an ill opinion of their rulers, were liable to action from the attorney-general. But from the revolution, the Whigs chose rather to contend with the enemy at his own weapons, than avail themselves, as they might have done, of the protection to be derived from such a state of the law. Such too, was the violence of party spirit in this and more subsequent reigns, and the gross form of the personalities and calumny with which the political press was charged, that the utmost license of this sort in our own time may be described as moderate in comparison with it. If excess could have justified stringency, it might assuredly have been justified then. It seemed to be the ambition of Tories, to display the utmost insolence of power, in their condition of weakness; and of the Whigs, on the contrary, to cede to the weak, advantages which have been almost invariably withholden by the strong. Certain lawyers, indeed, were disposed to adhere to the restrictive system as they found it, but there were illustrious exceptions among them; and juries, imbued with the spirit of the Whig ascendency of the times, began to insist on their right to judge as to the law as well as the facts of the cases brought before them, and the collisions which thus arose between the panel and the bench, did much to facilitate the subsequent improvements in our law of libel.

It is to this Whig reign especially that we must look for the era of our religious liberty. So long as the Anglican Church— meaning by that expression the great body of her Tory members, lay and clerical-could regard the ecclesiastical establish

ment as secure, nothing was further from her thoughts than any system of comprehension or toleration. In a pamphlet of 1681, well known at the time, the writer says, 'Liberty of con'science and toleration, are things only to be talked of, and pretended to by those that are under; but none like or think it reasonable that are in authority.' This was the genuine language of high Church Toryism, and the conduct of that party had always been to this effect. But in the reign of William the Third, the Toleration Act legalized and protected the places of worship used by Protestant Dissenters. That bill passed without much difficulty, but not,' says Mr. Hallam, without the murmurs of the bigoted Churchmen.' Some of that party would have restricted the perilous experiment to seven years; and the pamphlets published by them show how far they would have been from allowing such a measure to pass at all if they could have prevented it.

But if the Tories were weak on this point, there were some others on which they were strong; and their power to be intolerant always led to intolerance. William would have substituted the oaths of supremacy and allegiance, as a qualification for civil office, in the place of receiving the sacrament in the Church. But the cry was raised of an intention to favor papists, and the measure was rejected in the Lords by a large majority. Twelve Whig peers protested against that decision. It is probable that William would gladly have repealed the Test Act altogether, and have tolerated the Catholic worship, trusting to more honorable ties as means of securing the allegiance of his subjects. But no Tory could have approved of such a policy, and even the Whigs had much to learn on that subject. The act passed in 1700, against the growth of popery, is disgraceful evidence of the narrow prejudice which still prevailed on some of the points of religious liberty; though in this instance the law was so far neutralized by the better feeling of the judges and of the nation, as to have become almost a dead letter from its birth.

The same party manifested its zeal, and with similar success, in opposition to an attempt made to enlarge the basis of the Established Church, so as to take in some moderate nonconformists. On this subject, it was considered proper to submit the scheme proposed to the clergy in convocation. But their reverences were pleased to conduct themselves in a manner so uncompromising, and with such studied insolence, that the friends of this project allowed it to drop altogether, rather than expose themselves to the calumnies with which the conclave of bigots constituting the lower house of convocation was prepared to assail them had they persisted in it.

In the Act of Settlement we have another acquisition from

the joint though widely different feeling of Whigs and Tories. Such of the latter as concurred in it, did so because it was thought to secure the Established Church by restricting the succession to a Protestant. To the Whigs it was especially valuable as demonstrating the power of parliament in the disposal of the crown; and as it carried with it some new and important limitations on the prerogative. One of the most important of these limitations was that which gave independence to the judges, by providing that they should not be removable in future except on conviction of some offence, or upon the address of both houses of parliament. This measure has not freed the judges from all bias, but it has diminished their liability to a corrupt bias immensely. Our modern Tories, in the spirit of adulation which so easily besets them, have often ascribed this improvement to the times of George the Third.

With the reign of Anne came the excitement against the principles of the Revolution, in which that important personage Sacheverel made so conspicuous a figure; and toward the close of this reign the mixed kind of administration, which had hitherto in some degree prevailed, gave place to a decided Tory government. Among the fruits of this change was the peace of Utrecht-a hurried compact, by which France was saved, beyond her utmost hope, from that verge of ruin to which she had been reduced by the valor of British soldiers, and of the confederates, under command of Marlborough. France, accordingly, might well be grateful to the Tories of England in that reign; but our allies had too much reason to deplore the pusillanimity and treachery of that party; while in our domestic history they are to be remembered chiefly on account of their zeal to abridge the liberties of Protestant nonconformists, and by their known sentiments and secret plottings in relation to the exiled Stuarts, which were such as to expose the succession of the House of Hanover to alarming hazard, almost to the last moment. If the Established Church at that time had served to make the people christians, as certainly as it did to make the clergy Jacobites and Tories, it would have been the most successful institution our world has ever seen.

The Earl of Shrewsbury, in one of his letters to William, suggests that it would be well for his majesty to bear in mind concerning the Tories, that he was not their king. George the First had occasion to know that this significant hint was hardly less applicable to himself than to his illustrious predecessor; and it was in consequence strictly natural that on his accession a ministry of Tories should be succeeded by a ministry of Whigs. We do not mean to justify everything that was done in the impeachment of the Tory ministers Oxford and Bolingbroke; nor are we concerned to say whether the punishment of