In the middle of the seventeenth century the English people, accustomed for many generations to look to the monarch as their real ruler, began to tumble into chaos when they wrenched themselves free from the ingrained hereditary habit which had made loyalty to the King and orderly government convertible terms. They were not yet fit to govern themselves unaided; such fitness is not a God-given, natural right, but comes to a race only through the slow growth of centuries, and then only to those races which possess an immense reserve fund of strength, common-sense, and morality. The English of the middle of the seventeenth century were very much farther advanced along the road than were the French at the end of the eighteenth. They had no such dreadful wrongs to avenge as had the French people, and they indulged in no such bloodthirsty antics among themselves. But they had by no means attained to that power of compromise which they showed forty years later in the Revolution of 1688, or which was displayed by their blood-kin and political heirs, the American victors in the struggles of 1776 and 1861. In the English Revolution that placed William on the throne, in the American Revolution, and in the American Civil War, the victors passed through periods of great danger when it seemed possible that the fruits of their victory might be thrown away. They did not suffer the fate of the victors of 1648, chiefly because of the growth of the spirit of tolerance, of the capacity for compromise, which enabled them in part to ignore their own differences, and in part to abide by a peaceful settlement of them.