and serious effort upon the part of the State to secure dominion over freedom of thought. For this tendency of the modern State to dictate to its subjects what opinions they were to form on the most important issues was not confined to the Continent, but was rife in England no less than elsewhere. Indeed, it is not too much to say that for four centuries the English government attempted to enforce its views upon its subjects by the severest measures. It began with the laws for exterminating the Lollards. It practically ended with that penal code for the extirpation of Catholicism which, inaugurated under William III., assumed its worst features under Anne, that code which Burke justly stigmatised as an "unparalleled code of oppression."
At first, that is to say during the earlier part of the sixteenth century, it must be admitted that Englishmen seemed ready to acquiesce in the claim by the State to create their convictions for them. But this was not for long. Their independence was soon organised, and their resistance eventually came to a head in the great Civil War, the fundamental cause of which was that the people of these islands declined to have their beliefs dictated to them by governmental authority. In a word, the tyranny so successfully exercised on the Continent did not succeed in this country, whose inhabitants, whether Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, or Independent, though in turn
