From the end of the fourteenth century, an Englishman could already say as he does to-day: My business is not the business of the State, but the business of the State is my business. The whole of the English constitution, from the vote on the taxes to the _habeas corpus_, is comprised in this formula. In France the nation, practical, lucid, and logical in so many things, but easily amused, and too fond of chansons, neglected the opportunities that offered; the elect failed to attend the sittings; the bargains struck were not kept to. The Westminster Parliament voted subsidies on condition that reforms would be instituted; the people paid and the king reformed. In France, on the contrary, during the Middle Ages, the people tried not to pay, and the king tried not to reform. Thus the levying of the subsidy voted by the States-General of 1356-7, was the cause of bloody riots in France; the people, unenlightened as to their own interests, did their best to destroy their defenders: the agents of the States-General were massacred at Rouen and Arras; King John "the Good" published a decree forbidding the orders of the States to be fulfilled, and acquired instant popularity by this the most tyrannic measure of all his reign. These differences between the two political bodies had important consequences with regard to the development of thought in the two countries; they also excited the wonder and sometimes the admiration of the French. "The king of England must obey his subjects," says Froissart, "and do all they want him to."[421] "To my mind," writes Commines, "of all the communities I know in the world, the one where public business is best attended to, where the people are least exposed to violence, where there are no buildings ruined and pulled down on account of wars, that one is England."[422] "The English are the masters of their king," writes Ambassador Courtin in 1665, in almost the same words as Froissart, "their king can do nothing, unless what he wants is what they will."[423] III. Now are the vanquished and the victors of Hastings blended into one nation, and they are endowed with a Parliament as a safeguard for their liberties. "This is," Montesquieu said later, "the nation in the world that has best known how to avail itself at the same time of those three great things: religion, trade, and liberty."[424] Four hundred years before Montesquieu it already availed itself of these three great things; under Edward and Richard Plantagenets, England was what it has ever been since, a "merchant island."[425]