What Elizabeth contributed to this upgrowth of national prosperity was the peace and social order from which it sprang. While autos-de-fe were blazing at Rome and Madrid, while the Inquisition was driving the sober traders of the Netherlands to madness, while Scotland was tossing with religious strife, while the policy of Catharine secured for France but a brief respite from the horrors of civil war, England remained untroubled and at peace. Religious order was little disturbed. Recusants were few. There was little cry as yet for freedom of worship. Freedom of conscience was the right of every man. Persecution had ceased. It was only as the tale of a darker past that men recalled how ten years back heretics had been sent to the fire. Civil order was even more profound than religious order. The failure of the northern revolt proved the political tranquillity of the country. The social troubles from vagrancy and evictions were slowly passing away. Taxation was light. The country was firmly and steadily governed. The popular favour which had met Elizabeth at her accession was growing into a passionate devotion. Of her faults indeed England beyond the circle of her court knew little or nothing. The shiftings of her diplomacy were never seen outside the royal closet. The nation at large could only judge her foreign policy by its main outlines, by its temperance and good sense, and above all by its success. But every Englishman was able to judge Elizabeth in her rule at home, in her love of peace, her instinct of order, the firmness and moderation of her government, the judicious spirit of conciliation and compromise among warring factions which gave the country an unexampled tranquillity at a time when almost every other country in Europe was torn with civil war. Every sign of the growing prosperity, the sight of London as it became the mart of the world, of stately mansions as they rose on every manor, told, and justly told, in the Queen's favour. Her statue in the centre of the London Exchange was a tribute on the part of the merchant class to the interest with which she watched and shared personally in its enterprises. Her thrift won a general gratitude. The memories of the Terror and of the Martyrs threw into bright relief the aversion from bloodshed which was conspicuous in her earlier reign, and never wholly wanting through its fiercer close. Above all there was a general confidence in her instinctive knowledge of the national temper. Her finger was always on the public pulse. She knew exactly when she could resist the feeling of her people, and when she must give way before the new sentiment of freedom which her policy unconsciously fostered. But when she retreated, her defeat had all the grace of victory; and the frankness and unreserve of her surrender won back at once the love that her resistance lost. Her attitude at home in fact was that of a woman whose pride in the well-being of her subjects