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MODERN SOCIETY: EARLY STAGES
BY the opening of the seventeenth century the centralising bureaucratic monarchies were fairly established: nay, in France at least, they were even showing the birth of modern party government, which since—carried on, indeed, under the veil of constitutionalism—has been the type of all modern government. Richelieu—the Bismarck of his time and country—begins the series of prime ministers or real temporary kings, who govern in the interest of class society, not much encumbered and a good deal protected by their cloaks, the hereditary sham-kings. In England this prime-ministership was more incomplete, 105 though men like Burleigh approached the type. Elizabeth reduced the Tudor monarchy to an absurdity, a very burlesque of monarchy, under which flourished rankly an utterly unprincipled and corrupt struggle for the satisfaction of individual ambition and greed. This grew still more rankly, perhaps, under James I., who added abject cowardice to all the other vices which are more common to arbitrary high place and power.
As to the condition of the people during the latter years of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, the economical and religious revolution which had taken place had oppressed them terribly, and the “free workman” had to feel the full force of the causes which had presented him with his “freedom” in the interest of growing commerce. In England, on the one hand, the expropriation of the yeomanry from the land and the conversion of tillage into pasture had provided a large population of these free labourers, who, on the other hand, were not