unsympathising parents, the energy which made them great would not have been called forth, and they would have remained respectable but unhonoured members of the crowd. And if this is a true explanation, as it no doubt most often, though not always is, of the causes of individual efforts, it affords an analogy most true and most instructive of the causes of national progress.

Among all the nations of the world, I know not that any one has ever emerged from obscurity unless it had been goaded to extraordinary exertions, either by the pressure and exactions of a feudal aristocracy, or by the poverty and barrenness of the soil. If a people are settled on a soil sufficiently fertile to provide them with their simple wants, if no exacting lords rule over them, if population does not increase so rapidly as to compel them to change their mode of getting sustenance, then what have we but Boeotians, Norwegians, Danes, as they have been since they outrooted aristocracy; happy, it may be,-perhaps of a happiness surpassing that of great and renowned nations, as the ignoble crowd of easy-living people generally exceed in happiness those who have risen from ambition; simple and honest, it may be, and deserving of all respect upon that score; religious and moral, it may be, after a primitive, uninquiring, confiding fashion; but without energy, without sufficient principle of action to urge them, or any part of them, to great achievements; and so somnolent and doggedly determined not to deviate from the established rut, that if the world consisted of such people alone the torch of human knowledge, invention, discovery, creation, had, when scarce lighted, burnt out for want of air and movement to feed it.

It will be found that every nation which has reached its acme has either been exposed, like England, France, Rome, Tuscany, to the pressure and exactions of a feudal aristocracy, or, like the Venetians and the Carthaginians, been driven by their barren and inhospitable soil, or too confined territory, to seek by other means than its cul

ture, the food which it denies them; or, like the Athenians and the Dutch, been goaded by both causes at once to the exertions which have founded the national greatness. For greatness, be it of nations or of individuals, comes not of ease and plenty, but is the fruit of the brow's sweat and the soul's deep anguish.

Let us mark well this distinction, for it is of consummate importance. There is no history of Boeotia, no history of Norway, no history of Switzerland, because there is nothing to relate. Sometimes, in defence of their country, a noble and heroic effort is achieved. Let Epaminondas and William Tell have all their honour, but of the nation there is no history because there is no progress. They live, generation after generation, in the same ancestral homesteads, the seasons bring the only change that occurs in their employments, and each recurring year finds them not richer, not wiser; but as simple, as contented, as happy as before. Theirs is a picture giving delight to those who view it, like the calm beauty of a still summer's day. But out of storm, and floods, and tumult; out of sorrows and privations, by constant toil and desperate adventures, in despite of frowning skies, rugged earth, and brigand nobles, come the great achievements and solid national greatness which alone are due to the energy and endurance of a democratic element, thwarted and lashed into desperate action.

How begins the history of nations whose development has been the least imperfect? For a long time it consists of nothing but tales of ambition, strife, love, revenge, animating the breasts of a few aristocrats, and urging them to noble efforts and to great crimes. The scenes are tragic, the emotions deep, the actions arduous and of great import; the actors few, and all belonging to the class of conquerors; the ignoble many never come before the audience, except to raise their shout on behalf of one of the noble rivals, adding glory to his triumph, and by their presence, silent of articulate speech, voteless and

impotent to affect the destinies of the great, impressing the spectator with the contrasted grandeur and distinction of the heroes with whose struggles, victories, and defeats history is then solely employed.

After a while the historian stays his progress in this narrative of personal conflicts among the conquerors, and lights up, though but for a few brief moments, the crowd of the conquered. He tells how the mass of them still adhere to individual families of the barons, on whose land they were bred, they live, and they must die; while some few of them, scorning this servile stagnation, or lashed beyond endurance by the cruelty and avarice of the baron to whose estates they belong, fleeing from their homes to little centres of humble industry, seek protection of the loftiest of the barons, their elected head, and, obtaining from him a charter, transfer their allegiance from their old lords to their lords' king.

The light is turned off, and we hear no more of them for a long time; the family feuds, the tales of personal achievements, full of poetry and romance, continue to absorb all our interest. At last, through some coincidence, the whole of these foremost actors are ranged into two hostile ranks, nearly equally matched, and then instead of, as before, fighting it out among themselves, and only after the fight calling in the people to tell them who is their new master, they call them in while the fight is yet going on, to assist in determining its issue.

Then we are told how, since we last heard of them, these little chartered towns, hated of all nobles, had grown to power and importance; how their walls were well fortified, their treasure-houses well stored, their citizens skilful in arts and free in spirit, and now once fairly invoked as persons having a share in the arbitrement of political destinies, they are never lost sight of again, but the two contending factions of the aristocracy court their favour and invoke their arms.

All our commercial greatness, all that energy and spirit

which has made England what it is, all that restlessness of mind which leads to inventions and improvements both social and physical, we owe, in their rude origin, to the villains who were driven by aristocratic oppression to earn their bread by handicrafts and trades. In French history, and, though perhaps in a less degree still, in our history also, these townsmen bore about them the taint of their origin from the subject race. It is easy to imagine that conquerors, not remarkable for their sympathy with the serfs whom they had reduced to subjection, would like those serfs still less when, betaking themselves to towns, they became free citizens; and the word villain has derived its present meaning from the scorn of the castle for the town.* The Abbé Guibert called the royal charters of community a new and wicked device to procure liberty to slaves, and encourage them in shaking off the dominion of their masters; and by the English feudal law the superior lord was prohibited from marrying his female ward to a burgess or a villain. The serfs were like released prisoners, who still wore their prison dress.

And if from this state of society we turn to the present, when Birmingham can carry a Reform bill and Manchester remove the tax from corn, and ask what has raised this new power in the state-how have these villains and serfs come to dictate to their natural lords? The simple answer is, that trade and manufactures have raised them to be an

independent power. "When I have been upon the 'Change," says Addisont, "I have often fancied one of

"Quant à ceux, qui, n'ayant point de demeure seigneuriale, habitaient pêle-mêle à la manière Romaine, dans les villes et dans les hameaux, ils tiraient de cette circonstance un nom spécial qui remplaça leur ancien nom de peuple; on les appelait villains, et ce nom donné à un hommefranc, eût été pour lui le plus cruelle injurie."―Thierry, Conquêt d'Angl. i. 161. Villains, of course, meant originally the inhabitants of the towns (called in medieval Latin, villa).

† Guibert Abbat. de Vitâ suâ, lib. iii. c. 7, apud Script. rer. Francic. t. xii.

Spectator, No. Ixix.

our old kings standing in person, where he is represented in effigy, and looking down upon the wealthy concourse of people with which that place is every day filled. In this case, how would he be surprised to hear all the languages of Europe spoken in this little spot of his former dominions, and to see so many private men, who in his time should have been the vassals of some powerful baron, negociating, like princes, for greater sums of money than were formerly to be met with in the royal treasury. Trade, without enlarging the British territories, has given us a kind of additional empire; it has multiplied the number of the rich, made our landed estates infinitely more valuable than they were formerly, and added to them an accession of other estates as valuable as the lands themselves."

Sagacious legislators have not lost sight of this effect of commerce and manufactures, when it suited their ends to prevent it. The Spartan system, which provided for the maintenance of the aristocratic power by decreeing that the whole of the dominant races should live in a state of perpetual military training, likewise expressly forbade trade and manufactures. The natural consequence of which prohibition was that the Tepíoxо never rose to be an independent body in the state, nor till the final break up of the nation obtained the slightest share of power. The Austrian and Spanish governments in Italy, moved by the like considerations, have sedulously encouraged agriculture, because it is an occupation which, by spreading men over large surfaces of country, impedes their intercourse; by preserving them in health, fosters a state of stolid content, and in the observation of nature affords a ready occupation for any superfluity of mental energy which, in towns, might more likely be directed, by sickly and overworked artisans, to the observations of the vices of their superiors (a fertile theme), and the concoction of schemes for their own advancement. Had the Etruscan Lucu

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