What made the gathering of Magnates round the Government a necessity during the Dark Ages was the return to primitive conditions, the comparative difficulty of communications, and the continual armament of a free society, which was perpetually in conflict either domestic or through resistance to the Mohammedans and the heathens. You do not find absolutely centralized monarchy anywhere in the Dark Ages. You find it no more in Ireland or in Brittany or Galicia than you find it in the Rhine Valley or in Scandinavia; and the reason that you do not find it is that, under primitive conditions, such a thing cannot exist. Absolute monarchy, to be exercised over great numbers, needs high organization. Mr. Wells is right in saying that the presence of Knights of the Shire gave the British Parliament a special character; but he is quite at sea as to why they gave it a special character. The special character of the English Third Estate did not lie in the calling up to the King’s Council of men representing the smaller gentry. _That_ happened all over France and Northern Spain, and it began abroad long before it began in England. The first parliaments of Europe were in the Pyrenees. The special character of the English Commons House lay in the fact that the smaller gentry elsewhere sat in a house of their own, but here sat _with_ the merchants of the towns; and this made at last an organized unit wherein the combined wealth of the country could act against the King, who was the common guardian of all, rich and poor. In other words, the special constitution of the English Third Estate was one tending towards aristocracy. But England would never have become an aristocracy—as at last it did—nor would popular monarchy ever have been defeated and replaced by rule of the gentry had it not been for one economic factor of overwhelming importance of which Mr. Wells appears not to grasp the effect, I mean the dissolution of the monasteries. He does not even mention this prodigious economic revolution as having any connection with Parliament; yet it was the Dissolution which gave Parliament all its new power after the Reformation and enabled it to destroy the Crown. The reason was this: the monastic land and a great deal of other Church endowment as well (the endowment of a great many schools and hospitals and confraternities of all kinds, and endowments for Masses, etc., and a great part of the Bishopric endowments) passed into the hands of the Squires and greater Burgesses—the gentry—and immensely increased their economic power, while the economic power of the English Crown was correspondingly depressed. That is the whole story.