Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/30

 than controversy runs against any single explanation of the peculiarities in the institutions of England in the seventeenth century. Modern scholars are inclined to lay stress upon factors more tangible than innate characteristics of the people, namely, the early establishment of a despotic monarchy and the insularity afforded by the English Channel. The stark William the Conqueror and his powerful successors were able in the main to hold in subjection the feudal lords, lay and clerical, and in time weld warring kingdoms, principalities, and dukedoms into a fairly homogeneous society with one law, one administration, and a single language. Happily for the growing nation, the attempts of the baronage to break the Crown by imposing upon it the anarchic restraints of Magna Carta in the interests of inherited feudal privileges were defeated by the magnificent disregard which King John's successors showed for most of the prohibitions written down in that historic document.

Intimately related to this civilizing process was the English Channel—"The Silver Streak"—which, by cutting England off from her warlike and ambitious neighbors on the Continent, protected her government and her people against invading armies. Not after 1066 did a foreign marauder set foot on English soil; not after the close of the Wars of the Roses in 1485 was there a desperate quarrel of feudal lords to paralyze the fruitful occupations of industry in town and country. The king needed no powerful army and military caste to defend his fields and cities; these agencies atrophied, and as they decayed, the monarch who commanded them and the church that blessed them shared in their decline. To borrow Ruskin's images, the mighty were pulled down from their frowning crags; the bourgeois could sit safely on their money bags; and laborers, in their tattered rags, could search for employment, far away.