A period of industrial depression subtracts, in the estimation of the people, from the merits of a government, however noble may be its policy; and for twenty years previous to the Restoration the condition of the masses of the people had steadily been growing worse, so that there was a widespread longing for more provisions and less piety. Before the Civil War, the state of the people had reached high-water mark; so vast had been the increase of England's commerce, owing to the strife among the neighboring powers, that the revenue from customs had almost doubled, and the blessings of prosperity were felt among all classes. Sir Philip Warwick even asks us to believe that there was scarcely any cobbler in London whose wife did not include a silver beaker among the furnishings of her modest sideboard. During the Commonwealth, pauperism increased to an alarming extent, so that at the time of the coming of Charles ten thousand men and women were languishing in the debtors' prisons, and thousands of others were living in continual dread of the sheriff's executions. The condition of English society at the coming of Charles II. explains somewhat the tremendous outburst of popular enthusiasm with which that event was greeted. The people on the village green received him with morris dances to the music of pipe and tabor, and with other rustic festivities which for so long a time had been banished as sinful engagements. At some of the towns through which the triumphal procession passed, young damsels to the number of hundreds lined the way and strewed flowers in the path of the king. The women were especially noticeable for their active participation in all the popular demonstrations. It was as if they had felt so heavily the repression of the rigorous theocracy of Cromwell that they were ready to accept to the fullest the pledge of better times which the return of Charles gave them, and to pass from fuller liberty into the wildest license. The king himself, by his own example, lost no time in establishing the new standards of conduct. Even the reckless spirit of the Londoners was somewhat surprised when it was bruited abroad that the king, who was received as a Divine dispensation to a waiting people, had slunk out of the palace the first night after his return, under cover of darkness, in the furtherance of one of the unsavory intrigues which made his life and his court notorious in the annals of English history. The sensibilities of the English people were not seriously shocked, however,--we are speaking of the Royalist following and not of the Puritans,--and in the rebound from the first amazement at the revelation they received of the kingly character, they were ready to follow his lead; and so English social life during the reign of Charles was greatly corrupted. As the key to the times is to be sought in the tone of the court, the unwelcome task must be fulfilled in the interests of history, as it relates to woman, of setting forth