abolishing the reactionary clogs on the progress of the middle classes, had to disappear as elements which would have marred the true historical end of that revolution; to wit, the creation of a powerful middle class freed from all restrictions 120 that would interfere with it in its pursuit of individual profit, derived from the exploitation of industry. Thenceforth, till our own times, respectable political life in England has been wrapped up in whiggery; tinged, on one side, with the last faint remains of feudalism in the form of a quite unreal sentiment, involving no practical consequences but the acceptance of the name of Tory; and on the other by as faint a sentiment towards democracy, which was probably rather a traditional survival of the feeling of the old days of the struggle between King and Parliament, than any holding out of the hand towards the real democracy that was silently forming underneath the government of the respectables.
The first part of the eighteenth century, therefore, finds England solid and settled; all the old elements of disturbance and aspiration hardened into constitutional bureaucracy; religion recognised as a State formality, but having no influence whatever on the corporate life