determinate centre, whose votes had earlier turned the issue in the Commons toward Anglican triumph, swayed the other way, and finally divided as we have seen to the advantage of the Country party. The climax of the situation and of this phase of party evolution was reached in the circumstances accompanying the second Dutch war which began in the spring of 1672. As a preliminary to the measures determined upon, Parliament was prorogued and thus precluded from any possible interference with the plans of the administration. The declaration of war was prefaced by two arbitrary acts. To secure a sum of ready money, payment from the exchequer was suspended, and to pacify a section of the opposition a Declaration of Indulgence was issued granting permission to the Dissenters to establish conventicles licensed by the crown. Hostilities were begun before war was declared, by a treacherous and futile attempt to seize the homeward-bound Dutch Smyrna fleet. Here appeared the policy of the Court in its most extreme form-toleration by royal prerogative, finance by royal edict, a vigorous, mercenary foreign policy, and the exclusion of Parliament from all three, while behind these lay the secret arrangement between the king and his cousin, Louis XIV., and the avowed Catholicism of the heir to the English throne.

When the Houses met again the Country party, now with a clear majority in the Commons on such questions, set forth in turn their policy. They repudiated the obligations the ministry had incurred by the stop of the exchequer on the ground that this involved unparliamentary taxation. They forced the king to recall the Declaration of Indulgence and resolved that the power to regulate ecclesiastical as well as financial affairs belonged to Parliament alone. They demanded that the troops raised for the Dutch war be disbanded, on the same ground of parliamentary control. They declared for peace with the Dutch and hostility to France, an encroachment on the royal prerogative, the king declared later, without precedent save in time of revolution. Finally a bill was introduced for the ease of Protestant Dissenters and the programme completed by the passage of the Test Act which excluded Catholics from all office, civil and military.

The result was decisive. James and his allies were driven from place and power. The king's Catholic policy was destroyed at a blow, and Catholicism eliminated from open activity in English politics. The prerogative in foreign affairs was attacked, and the question of the Protestant succession brought into the realm of practical politics. The defense of his prerogative and his pension, de

rived from the French alliance, and of his house, personified in James, henceforth absorbed the king's energies.

Meanwhile two of the Protestant section of the Cabal, Shaftesbury and Buckingham, advised of the king's bad faith, and marking the signs of the times, trimmed their course to meet or direct the storm. The former was dismissed and at once entered into direct relations with the Country party. He was followed by others, among whom Buckingham was most prominent. The opposition was thus strengthened not merely by its new allies in the Lords; in the person of Shaftesbury was supplied the principal element it had hitherto in great measure lacked, a recognized leader of ability and resource. He, in turn, found ready to his hand a political weapon and a situation peculiarly suited to his genius and purpose. He did not create the party, nor was he in any real sense its founder. But he took command of the able men of the new generation, like Sacheverell, who had done so much to give the party its new form, as well as of the older Presbyterian leaders whom the new men had themselves in some measure replaced. Shaftesbury was a master politician, and under his guidance the party took on new form and vigor. It was gradually welded into a machine, including all elements from the liberal Lords to the London mob, Presbyterians, moderate country gentlemen, and sectaries.

The evolution of the Country party was now nearly complete. It had increased its numbers till it was prepared to contend with its opponents on fairly equal terms. It had developed a set of principles based on toleration, commercial interest, liberty of the subject, Protestantism, and parliamentary supremacy. It had acquired a leader, and a small but able following in the Lords. It needed but one thing, some force to counterbalance the more effective organization of the court. That was quickly supplied. In 1675 was founded the so-called Green Ribbon Club which, from its headquarters at King's Head Tavern, soon became the recognized centre of the party, the seat of its executive and of its inner councils. There party policies were formulated by the group of leaders about Shaftesbury, and methods improved or invented to further them. Systematic political management in and out of the House was developed. The loose political connection was drilled and disciplined into a party, and the last superiority of the court was equalized by this new leadership and organization which rapidly developed the principles and practices of the later Whig party.

Against this, on the part of the court, the Council was reorganized by the introduction of moderate Protestant lords. The conduct

of affairs was placed in the hands of the ablest upholder of church and crown, Thomas Osborne, presently created Earl of Danby. He began at once to unite more closely the courtiers in the Commons, the Clarendonian remnant, old high church and prerogative men, King's Friends, placemen and pensioners, into a reorganized Court party. In the Lords, the crown could rely on a steady majority of spiritual and temporal peers. In and out of the House it extended still further the policy of corruption and management. It gave up the Catholic policy. And though the king held to his French connection and pension, Danby repudiated both, and like Shaftesbury before him, though on different grounds, sought to mould the king to his own plans, and stand between king and Commons, directing both along conservative lines. With this the circle was complete.

The parliamentary session of 1675 saw the first engagement between the forces thus constituted and officered. On the part of the court the royal pretension to supremacy in church affairs and a Catholic policy were tacitly abandoned for a programme of extreme conformity to be enacted by Parliament and enforced by the crown. One of the earliest measures was a passive obedience bill introduced into the Lords. To this was added a plea for the traditional balance of king, Lords, and Commons, and the resistance to parliamentary encroachment on the prerogative especially in foreign affairs. Insistence on ministerial rights, the undiminished power of the executive, and the direct legitimate succession completed a programme which combined the ideas of Clarendon and the court, modified to meet the existing situation. Against this the Country party sought to identify the court with Catholicism and arbitrary government, both of which they denounced. They protested against a standing army and a French policy. They demanded greater liberty of the subject, free and frequent parliamentary sessions, control of finance and a voice in foreign affairs for the Commons, toleration, ministerial responsibility, and general parliamentary supremacy, in short the principles of the Bill of Rights.

With this the plea for strong government and the superiority of the executive stood out clearly against that for popular government and the superiority of the legislature. For some three years the political conflict was confined to these issues. Perhaps if the ordinary political processes had not been interrupted, or personal rivalries had not been so acute, the situation might have gradually worked itself out along evolutionary rather than revolutionary lines. But neither side would wait, perhaps neither side could wait. The Popish Plot accelerated the movement of affairs, which hurried on

to the crisis of the Exclusion Bill. After a brief interval of quiet, reaction and revolution revived with the accession of James. Country and Court in that troubled decade from 1675 to 1685 gave place to Petitioner and Abhorrer, and these to Whig and Tory. Corruption rose to a height not exceeded under the arch-tempter Walpole; the prerogative was strained to the breaking-point; political agitation was carried to a height scarcely short of revolution. But, apart from change of name and greater intensity of rivalry, English party principles, methods, organization, even personnel, changed little after 1675. The Tory party which emerged from the Revolution differed in no essential particular from the Court party which completed its evolution under Danby. The Whigs were to all intents the Country party with its allies and leaders in the Lords.

The details of political practice alter with changing conditions. But it was not until the electorate itself was revolutionized in the nineteenth century that even these departed in any radical degree from the lines laid down between 1660 and 1675. There, if anywhere, it would appear, are to be found the beginnings of English parties on the lines we have laid down.

WILBUR C. ABBOTT.

THE COALITION OF EUROPE AGAINST NAPOLEON1

THE Europe of the kings was for fifteen years at war with Napoleon, as it had been with the Revolution of which he was the heir; like the Revolution he cast down the bastiles of feudalism and carried everywhere the gospel of equality; at Austerlitz he gave a mortal blow to the Holy Roman-German Empire, and thenceforward national aspirations had freedom to express and realize themselves; when he was vanquished, the people were vanquished with him, and fell back for a time under the yoke of the kings and of the Holy Alliance.

There was, then, whatever may be thought of it in England and in America, nothing in common between the great emperor whom all the peoples of France and of other countries surrounded with a kind of worship during his captivity in St. Helena-and it was a memory they have never ceased to celebrate-and the cowardly bandits who but yesterday flooded Europe again with blood, and will have forever the curses of humanity.

Not that Napoleon did not have ambition; he was very ambitious; he wished to reign and for a brief time did reign over Europe. But the essential fact which history will record is that he made war upon the kings, defenders of the feudal privileges of the old régime. And if the kings, when conquered, at last appealed to the peoples, it was but to oppress them anew and to restore the sway of privilege. Napoleon had to do with coalitions of kings only; long victorious over kings and emperors, he was at last conquered by the kings, and therein again his history is absolutely contrasted with that which has been enacted in our time.

And finally, it is because the coalitions of these kings were only dynastic coalitions that they were so hard to form, that they were constantly weakened and for a long time made impotent by rivalries; it is because they were not inspired by the great breath of liberalism which has made yesterday's allies victorious; it is because the great forces of the Revolution were on the side of Napoleon,

1 This study has been made easier for me by the works which I have already published and which I ask leave to mention: La Politique Orientale de Napoléon (Paris, Félix Alcan, 1904); Napoléon en Italie (ibid., 1906); Napoléon et l'Europe: I. La Politique Extérieure du Premier Consul (ibid., 1910), II. Austerlitz, la Fin du Saint Empire (ibid., 1912), III. Tilsit, la Rivalité de la France et de la Russie (ibid., 1917).