All nations of Europe had constitutions more or less similar to that of England during the Middle Ages; for there was after all a very considerable amount of Liberty extant in mediæval institutions. But at the threshold of the sixteenth century, when new worlds were discovered by the genius and daring of the Portuguese and the Italians, the better part of the old world, that is, its Liberty, was completely lost, and sovereigns became absolute and peoples slaves. Three nations alone amongst the larger states remained unaffected by the plague of absolutism then spreading over Europe; they alone preserving intact the great principles of local autonomy, central parliaments, and limited power of the Crown. These were the English, the Poles and the Hungarians. In these three countries alone there was practically no dead past as against a presumptuous present. The nation’s past was still living in the shape of actual realities, and the growth of the constitution was, in spite of all sudden ruptures and breaks, continuous and organic. What the Stuarts were to England, the Habsburgs were to Hungary during the seventeenth century. Hence in both countries we notice continual rebellions and wars, both parliamentary and other. The Stuarts, however, were little aided by foreign powers in their attempts at crushing the autonomous rights of the English nation. On the contrary, one of the greatest statesmen of modern times, William of Orange, came, and with him several great powers of Europe, to the rescue of the people of England; and thus the end of the seventeenth century was also the termination of Absolutism in England. In Hungary it was the grave of Liberty. The Hungarian Stuarts, or the then Habsburgs, far from being deserted by the other Great Powers of Europe, were most efficiently abetted by them. This happened of course in a way apparently quite alien to any desire to destroy the liberties of Hungary. Vienna, the capital of the Habsburgs, was, in 1683, besieged by the hitherto fairly invincible Turks, and Austria was menaced with utter ruin. The war being, on the face of it, a crusade, the Christian powers, and, chiefly, fat and gallant John Sobieski, King of Poland, came to the succour of Leopold of Austria. The Turk was beaten, and not only out of Austria, but also out of Hungary, where he had been holding two-thirds of the counties for over one hundred and fifty years. Hungary was almost entirely liberated from her Mahometan oppressor, and, such is the illogicality of History, for the very same reason nearly lost her autonomous existence. For the evil of foreign saviours now told on the Magyars. Had they driven back the Turk by their own efforts, the result would have been an unprecedented electrization and stimulation of all the forces of the nation. The Greeks after Salamis; the Romans after Zama; the English after Trafalgar had won not only a victory over an enemy, but an immeasurably increased vitality fraught with novel energies.