of Disraeli, in his Young England stage, tried to equate the
politics of Falkland and Strafford to those of his own day, to
catch from Bolingbroke the 'essential and permanent character'
of Toryism, and to identify the Whigs of 1832 with that cause
'for which Hampden died on the field and Sidney on the
scaffold'. The old England, however, from which Disraeli
drew this new history, was in fact a very different country
to that of the fourth William, and the great events of two
revolutions rise like barriers of rock between us and the
Cavaliers. Those events swept away the provincial, rural,
and aristocratic cadre of the seventeenth century for ever.
All the conditions which give to a party its social background,
its prejudices, and its mould of tradition, as distinct from its
intellectual ideas, were wholly transformed in the interval
between the death of Anne and the birth of Queen Victoria's
minister.

Of such governing conditions the foremost in the seventeenth
century was provincialism. The great currents of public
opinion, now implicit in an educated democracy, a cheap Press,
and swift transport, then ran sluggishly and in separate tribu-
taries, with only now and then a fierce tide. London, it is
true, was fast growing, but Lord Clarendon's mother for one
had never entered it, and conservative families disliked the
'great wen', which threatened to engulf the fortunes of their
sons and the characters of their daughters. In spite of a large
pamphlet literature, clubs, coffee-houses, and a widely diffused
university education, free political opinion, though the ultimate
factor, still breathed with difficulty amid ancient barriers.
The localism of the Middle Ages had not yet disappeared, the
impress of the Reformation had borne very differently upon
different areas, and the levelling force of world-markets and
uniform economic conditions had not yet sapped the dis-
tinctive character of individual English shires. In the political
struggles opening before us, and particularly of course in the
Civil War, it is possible to discern several bands of territory,
each with its marked political genius. Ideas common to the
whole country took on a different hue as they crossed the
Trent, the Tamar, or the Humber, and the predominant
royalism of Kent differed as much from that of the Scottish

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