Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/25

contemplate the contrasts which subsequently arose. For a century and a half after these civil conflicts ended, there were but few and trivial breaches of internal peace, while such wars as went on with foreign powers, not numerous, took place as usual out of England; and during this period the retrograde movement which the Wars of the Roses set up was reversed and popular power greatly increased; so that, in the words of Mr. Bagehot, "the slavish Parliament of Henry VIII grew into the murmuring Parliament of Queen Elizabeth, the mutinous Parliament of James I, and the rebellious Parliament of Charles I." Meanwhile France, during the first third of this period, had been engaged in almost continuous external wars with Italy, Spain, and Austria; while during the remaining two thirds it suffered from almost continuous internal wars, religious and political; the accompanying result being that, notwithstanding resistances from time to time made, the monarchy became increasingly despotic. To make fully manifest the different social types that had been evolved under these different conditions, we have to compare not only the respective political constitutions but also the respective systems of social control. Observe what these were at the time when there commenced the reaction which ended in the French Revolution. In harmony with the theory of the militant type, that the individual is, in life, liberty, and property, owned by the state, the monarch had come to be universal proprietor. Giving nothing in return, he took whatever houses and lands he pleased; and the burdens he imposed on land-owners were so grievous that some of them preferred abandoning their estates to paying. Then, besides the taking of property by the state, there was the taking of labor. One fourth of the working-days in the year went as corvées, due to the king and in part to the feudal lord. Such liberties as were allowed had to be paid for again and again; the municipal privileges of towns being seven times in twenty-eight years withdrawn and resold to them. Military services of nobles and people were imperative to whatever extent the king demanded; and conscripts were drilled under the lash. At the same time that the subjection of the individual to the state was pushed to such an extreme by exactions of money and services that the impoverished people cut the grain while it was green, ate grass, and died of starvation in millions, the state did little to guard their persons and homes. Contemporary writers enlarge on the multitudinous highway robberies, burglaries, assassinations, and torturings of people to discover their hoards; herds of vagabonds, levying black-mail, roamed about, and when, as a remedy, penalties were imposed, innocent persons denounced as vagabonds were sent to prison without evidence. There was no personal security either against the ruler or against powerful enemies: in Paris there were some thirty prisons where untried and unsentenced people might be incarcerated; and the "brigandage of justice" annually cost suitors forty to sixty millions of francs. While the state, aggressing on citizens to such