who had counselled it.[341] Yet this uproarious session produced one good thing. Before proroguing Parliament the king gave his assent to the Habeas Corpus Act, its solitary record on the statute book. How near that sheet was to being blank may be told by the fact that this measure, of weighty importance in the history of England, only passed its third reading in the House of Lords because the Whig teller in joke counted one very fat lord as ten.[342] Neither Parliament nor the privy council as a whole can properly be said at this time to have been the government of the country. Under the old system the council was a large and chiefly honorary body, the business of which was regularly transacted by a few of its members. By Sir William Temple’s construction it became a miniature of the House of Commons as in the days when the government could count upon about half the votes with an occasional majority. Though those who carried on affairs might be privy councillors, there were also many councillors who made it their chief business to prevent them from doing so. The parliament of 1679 was still less to be classed with the government than its predecessor. Here the Commons hardly disguised an overmastering wish to obstruct the administration by others until it fell wholly into their own hands, and to force on the government a policy framed in the country and strongly disapproved at court. The humour of the Commons seemed to infect the Lords also. The alarm and activity of the upper house throughout the panic of the Plot almost equalled those of the Commons; and it was by great exertion alone that the court could carry the day even when the gravest interests were at stake. The English state presented at the moment a striking appearance. Since the beginning of the modern world government in England has been with scant exception by consent, not only in the sense that in every case force is ultimately on the side of the governed, but by virtue of the fact that the English government has had nothing on which to rely but the consent of the nation. Two famous examples had already shown how hard of execution other methods must be. Mutual agreement between parts of the frame was necessary to its usefulness. But now it seemed as if this was no more. Variance had sprung up and silently grown until it became direct opposition. Government and governed were divided by an openly contrary spirit. It was a question how far Charles’ government could allow the division to widen without being engulfed in it. On the one side were ranged the forcible and callous statesmen who had organised the country party in the old Cavalier Parliament and transformed its soul to Whiggism; the country gentlemen, formerly staunchest adherents of the government, the class from whom now its keen opponents were drawn; religious dissenters; high-principled republicans; malcontents of every kind; the squirearchy, the magistracy, the Church of England.[343] On the other there met this