George Bancroft, History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent, Vol. 2, 17th edition.

[18] liberty had become the patrimony and estate of the

Chap. XI.}

commons; the forms of government, the courts of justice, peace and war, all executive, all legislative power, rested with them. They were irresponsible, absolute, and apparently never to be dissolved but at their own pleasure.

But the commons were not sustained by the public opinion of the nation. They were resisted by the royalists and the Catholics, by the Presbyterians and the fanatics, by the honest republicans and the army. In Ireland, the Catholics dreaded the worst cruelties that Protestant bigotry could inflict. Scotland, almost unanimous in its adhesion to Presbyterianism, regarded with horror the rise of democracy, and the triumph of the Independents; the fall of the Stuarts foreboded the overthrow of its independence; it loved liberty, but it loved its nationality also. It feared the sovereignty of an English parliament, and desired the restoration of monarchy as a guaranty against the danger of being treated as a conquered province. In England, the opulent landholders, who swayed their ignorant dependents, rendered popular institutions impossible; and too little intelligence had as yet been diffused through the mass of the people, to make them capable of taking the lead in the progress of civilization. The fruitful schemes of social and civil equality found no support but in the enthusiasm of the few who fostered them; and the heaviest clouds of discontent gathered sullenly round the nation.

The attempt at a counter revolution followed. But the parties by which it was made, though a vast majority of the three nations, were filled with mutual antipathies; the Catholics of Ireland had no faith in the Scottish Presbyterians; and these in their turn