DIGITISED MANUSCRIPTS

es) eruelties he perpetrate], exasperated his subjects, and produced a revolution which drove him from the throne. And yet this revolution can hardly be termed the outcome of public opinion, for the people, injured and oppressed as they were, almost bore their miseries without complaint. It was a revolution effected by the chief statesmen of the day, who com- J bined against an intolerable despotism. But the result of this revolution was, that when Parliament met again in 1689 it was able to discuss public questions with a freedom from royal influence here- tofore unknown ; to frame laws which formed the foundations of our present liberties, and to curtail the power of the monarch. This altered state of affairs opened the way for the institution of Party Government, by producing a healthy rivalry between two parties in the State—the Whigs aud Tories— for the support and approval of the public. Thus, in 1689, political public opinion first dawned on British soil. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to assume that the parliaments of the eighteenth cen- | tury genuinely reflected publie opimion as they do in the nineteenth. The country remained virtually misrepresented until the Reform Bill of 1832, both | as regards the representation of constituencies and the relations between constituencies and their repre- sentatives. The former was inadequate, and the latter were unsatisfactory.