Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/16

2 the corn laws; but their aggregation did not form a political party which could survive the adoption of the one object, and devote itself to affecting the broad general lines of national policy. This is to be taken as applying not to the individual members of the league, but to the particular organization itself. Its founders and main supporters, if not in numbers, at least in power, were members of a wider party, and were the result of its growth and the occasion of its further development; but in that respect the league was an instrument which they used, and not an organism of which they were parts.

Let us now take an example—the most important, perhaps, in our history, and sufficiently remote to enable us to examine it with impartiality—of the manner in which natural party characteristics survive, and more conscious and artificial combinations die out. In the struggle between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians in the seventeenth century, the two most elementary parties into which a nation can be divided, and which in every community exist in a more or less developed state, came into inevitable contest. The principles of authority on the one side and of liberty on the other were opposed in the most direct manner. These two ideas are both essential to the existence of society and to the exercise of the functions of government; yet they are so essentially distinct, and, under certain circumstances, so .conflicting, that they form centres towards which individual natures, with varying tendencies and sympathies, are attracted in natural groups. They may be regarded as vital powers, each struggling to preserve its own existence, and which, although they are ultimately reconcilable, are for a time fiercely antagonistic.

We should have to go much further back if we wished to trace the time when the first divergence took place, and in a community all practically accepting the idea of a personal authority, there were some who desired to place limits to its exercise, and who by degrees became wise enough to devise and strong enough to enact regular constitutional checks.