Such a revolution might have ended in the substitution of the despotism of a class for the despotism of a man. Many causes combined to prevent this result. The landowners, who formed the majority of the House, were not elected directly, as was the case with the nobility of the French states-general, by their own class, but by electors who, though generally loyal to them, would have broken off from them if they had attempted to make themselves masters of their fellow citizens. No less important was the almost absolute independence of the judges, begun at the beginning of the reign, by the grant of office to them during good behaviour instead of during the king's pleasure, and finally secured by the clause in the Act of Settlement in 1701, which protected them against dismissal except on the joint address of both Houses of Parliament. Such an improvement, however, finds its full counterpart in another great step already taken. The more representative a government becomes, the more necessary it is for the well-being of the nation that the expression of individual thought should be free in every direction. If it is not so, the government is inclined to proscribe unpopular opinion, and to forget that new opinions by which the greatest benefits are likely to be conferred are certain at first to be entertained by a very few, and are quite certain to be unpopular as soon as they come into collision with the opinions of the majority. In the middle ages the benefits of the liberation of thought from state control had been secured by the antagonism between church and state. The Tudor sovereigns had rightfully asserted the principle that in a well-ordered nation only one supreme power can be allowed to exist; but in so doing they had enslaved religion. It was fortunate that, just at the moment when parliamentary control was established over the state, circumstances should have arisen which made the majority ready to restore to the individual conscience that supremacy over religion which the medieval ecclesiastics had claimed for the corporation of the universal church. Dissenters had, in the main, stood shoulder to shoulder with churchmen in rejecting the suspicious benefits of James, and both gratitude and policy forbade the thought of replacing them under the heavy yoke which had been imposed on them at the Restoration. The exact mode in which relief should be afforded was still an open question. The idea prevalent with the more liberal minds amongst the clergy was that of comprehension--that is to say, of so modifying the prayers and ceremonies of the church as to enable the dissenters cheerfully to enter in. The scheme was one which had approved itself to minds of the highest order--to Sir Thomas More, to Bacon, to Hales and to Jeremy Taylor. It is one which, as long as beliefs are not very divergent, keeps up a sense of brotherhood overruling the diversity of opinion. It broke down, as it always will break down in practice, whenever the difference of