[21] Though the English first developed regulated or constitutional government, they themselves have no single written constitution. Instead, the foundations of English constitutional government rest on Magna Charta (1215), the Petition of Rights (1628), and the Bill of Rights (1689), these three constituting "the Bible of English Liberty."
[22] At first used as a term of ridicule, from the very methodical manner in which the Wesleyans organized their campaigns.
[23] "If we except the great Puritan movement of the seventeenth century, no such appeal had been heard since the days when Augustine and his band of monks landed in Kent and set forth on their mission among the barbarous Saxons. The results answered fully to the zeal that awakened them. Better than the growing prosperity of extending commerce, better than all the conquests of the East or the West, was the new religious spirit which stirred the people of both England and America, and provoked the National Church to emulation in good works—which planted schools, checked intemperance, and brought into vigorous activity all that was best and bravest in a race that when true to itself is excelled by none." (Montgomery, D. H., English History, p. 322.)
[24] The contrast between eighteenth-century England and France, in the matter of religious liberty, is interesting. In France the Church took care, during the whole of the eighteenth century, that the persecution process should go on. "In 1717 an assembly of seventy-four Protestants having been surprised at Andure, the men were sent to the galleys and the women to prison. An edict of 1724 declared that all who took part in a Protestant meeting, or who had any direct or indirect communication with a Protestant preacher, should have their heads shaved and be imprisoned for life, and the men condemned to perpetual servitude in the galleys. In 1745 and 1746, in the province of Dauphine, 277 Protestants were condemned to the galleys and a number of women flogged. From 1744 to 1752 six hundred Protestants in the east and south of France were condemned to various punishments. In 1774 the children of a Calvinist of Rennes were taken from him. Up to the very eve of the Revolution Protestant ministers were hanged in Languedoc, and dragoons were sent against their congregations." (Dabney, R. H., Causes of the French Revolution, p. 42.)
[25] Back as early as 1695 the Commons had refused to renew the press- licensing act, enacted in 1637, to control heresy. This had confined printing to London, Oxford, and Cambridge, and to twenty master printers and four letter founders for the realm. This refusal marks the beginning of the freedom of the press in England. In 1709 the copyright law was enacted, and in 1776 the redress against publishers of libelous articles was confined to the ordinary courts of law. A century ahead of France, and more than two centuries ahead of Teutonic and Romanic lands, England provided for a free press and open discussion.
[26] George III, always consistently wrong, opposed this extension of popular rights. In 1771 he wrote the Prime Minister, Lord North: "It is highly necessary that this strange and lawless method of publishing debates in the papers should be put a stop to. But is not the House of Lords the best court to bring such miscreants before; as it can fine, as well as imprison, and has broader shoulders to support the odium of so salutary a measure."
[27] "It is evident that a nation perfectly ignorant of physical laws will refer to supernatural causes all the phenomena by which it is surrounded. But as soon as natural science begins to do its work there are introduced the elements of a great change. Each successive discovery, by ascertaining the law that governs events, deprives them of that apparent mystery in which they were formerly involved. The love of the marvelous becomes proportionally diminished; and when any science has made such progress as to enable it to fortell the events with which it deals, it is clear that the whole of those events are at once withdrawn from the jurisdiction of the supernatural, and brought under the authority of natural power? Hence it is that, supposing other things equal, the superstition of a nation must always bear an exact proportion to the extent of its physical knowledge." (Buckle, H. T., History of Civilization in England, vol. 1, p. 269.)
[28] The Charter of this Society stated the purpose to be to increase knowledge by direct experiment, and that the object of the Society was the extension of natural knowledge, as opposed to that which is supernatural. As an institution embodying the idea of intellectual progress it was most bitterly assailed by partisans of the old flunking.
[29] Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, and Manchester, for example, great manufacturing cities early in the nineteenth century, were insignificant villages in Cromwell's day. The steam engine made the coal and iron deposits of northern England of immense value, and the "smoky mill towns" that arose in the north began to displace southern agricultural England in population, wealth, and importance.
[30] For example, in 1774 John Howard began his great work in prison reform; in 1772 pressing to death was abolished; in 1780 the ducking-stool was used for the last time; and soon thereafter the earlier laws relating to the death penalty were modified, and the slave trade abolished. Up to the middle of the eighteenth century as many as one hundred and sixty offenses were punishable by death.