Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: countrymen in the towns, shared their resistance, and were ultimately joined by the great barons. Hence the peculiar character of the English constitution: aristocratic rather than monarchic, provincial rather than metropolitan, localized not centralized. From Iliumy mede to the aristocratic appropriation of Church property at the dissolution of the monasteries, from the dissolution of the monasteries to the aristocratic Revolution of 1688, the power of the great landowning families in England relatively to the monarchy has been, with the tacit consent of the English people, ever on the increase; and at the death of William in. these families became virtually supreme, and the monarch, as has been well said, was reduced to the condition of the Venetian Doge. In France, from inverse causes, the process was inverse. There, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the feudal nobility was very strong, the monarchy singularly weak; and there the Third Estate made common cause with the monarchy against the aristocratic power. Hence the different colour of subsequent French history. In France, in England, and in every other country of Europe, the ultimate goal was, and still remains?for it is as yet far from completely attained, ?the same: the elimination of feudalism, of privilegedclasses, the full establishment of the modern system of free industry, the complete incorporation of the working classes into the political body. But whereas in England the people, in their progress towards this goal, have accepted the government of a strong provincial local aristocracy, depressing the feudal monarchy, and more or less effectually heading the industrial movement;, in France the people have co-operated with the monarchy against the aristocracy. For the French people, the growth of the monar...