do this or that." In practice, however, he found, and his son Charles I (1625) was to find still more effectually, that there were in his dominions a great number of landlords and merchants, substantial and intelligent persons, who set a very definite limit to the calls and occasions of the monarch and his ministers. They were prepared to tolerate his rule if they themselves might also be monarchs of their lands and businesses and trades and what not. But not otherwise.
Everywhere in Europe there was a parallel development. Beneath the kings and princes there were these lesser monarchs, the private owners, noblemen, wealthy citizens, and the like, who were now offering the sovereign prince much the same resistance that the kings and princes of Germany had offered the Emperor. They wanted to limit taxation so far as it pressed upon themselves, and to be free in their own houses and estates. And the spread of books and reading and inter-communication was enabling these smaller monarchs, these monarchs of ownership, to develop such a community of ideas and such a solidarity of resistance as had been possible at no previous stage in the world's history. Everywhere they were disposed to resist the prince, but it was not everywhere that they found the same faculties for an organized resistance. The economic circumstances and the political traditions of the Netherlands and England made those countries the first to bring this antagonism of monarchy and private ownership to an issue.[1]
At first this seventeenth-century "public," this public of property owners, cared very little for foreign policy. They did not perceive at first how it affected them. They did not want to be
- ↑ It was private conscience, rather than private property, that quarrelled with and limited princes. The Puritan Revolution in England (1640-1660) was a puritan revolution—it sprang from the religious motive first and foremost. The economic motive was secondary. The "economic interpretation of history" is always tempting, but men's souls have always mattered more than their pockets. Englishmen fought Charles I for the sake of free consciences rather than for the sake of free pockets. This is a large issue, on which much could be written; but I feel sure that religion came first in our Civil War.—E. B.
I do not agree. Loath as I am to differ from E. B., I can find no evidence of any religious issue as important as the issue of taxation either in the English Civil War or the American War of Independence.—H. G. W.
I did not mention the Americans. I will surrender them to H. G. W.—E. B.
