acting as governors and to some extent as instructors of the real scholars, now a subject class. So close was the organization of the life within and under the colleges that the instruction given directly by the university was at length displaced by that of professors, lecturers and tutors in colleges. The scholars under the masters of the university in its early stages came to be inmates exclusively of colleges and dependent halls, so that membership in the university was virtually derivative through the colleges. The university offices, too, came to be occupied by heads or appointees of colleges in rotation and the work of reducing the university to a federation of colleges was completed by restricting the membership of its chief administrative board to the heads of colleges.

In the non-ecclesiastical corporations for educational and other eleemosynary purposes, the relations that had been the product of the preceding centuries of university and college development were expressed by separating the corporation from the scholars or others subject to it, and by identifying them with the endowment rather than with the work of instruction, as had been the case with the earlier corporations.

THE

II

NATIONAL ENGLAND

HE one word that most adequately describes the England of Elizabeth is the adjective "national." From whatever side it be viewed, the historical development of the English people since the Norman Conquest had been in the direction of a greater participation by every Englishman in the common life of all Englishmen.

On the political side, the overlordship of the Norman kings imposed on a feudal nobility had become the kingship of the Tudors with a national people for its subjects. A Great Council of feudal barons had been succeeded by a Parliament of the representatives of the English people. A system of national taxation, though crude and arbitrary, was year by year teaching every English subject that he and his fellow-subjects were joint participants in the new national life, while the crown was learning from it that it had strength and vigor only as it was truly representative of the common thought and sentiment of its subjects. Feudalism as a system had passed away and in place of the sovereignty of a king filtered through a hierarchy of feudal classes was a sovereignty based on the consent of the people. Elizabeth was the first monarch of national England. She was the first, and the last for two centuries, to understand that the English kingship was real and a thing of substance only as it participated in and absorbed the thoughts and sentiments of the English people.

In religion, the national pride had found in the Catholic

Church and its popes a galling foreign power and had replaced them with a "Church of England" and the English sovereign at its head. And the Reformation had given to the movement of religious freedom in England such a distinctive character that the English people could see in the Church of England something peculiarly their own, something that they would love and defend rather from patriotism than from fanaticism.

The outburst of intellectual and literary energy that glorified the Elizabethan half-century of peaceful and conciliatory rule served more than all else to bring the English people to a consciousness of their nationality. The use of English as a literary language became a stronger bond of union for the English people. The knowledge of foreign lands as something more than the spoil of conquests brought self-consciousness to the English nation. The study of English history and English life and the growth of the universities produced a broader sympathy of class with class.

If Elizabethan England was a nation from the standpoints of government, religion, literature and learning, it was not less a nation from that of economics and industry. Feudalism as an industrial system was dead and its hierarchy of industrial classes had decayed. The commutation of feudal dues had swollen the numbers of a free agricultural class. The class of artisans had grown up outside of and independent of the feudal system. The feudal nobility had accepted the verdict of industrial history and the first great period of enclosure had come to an end in 1530; henceforth they were to be landowners, like their freed tenants, differing from them chiefly in the mere extent of their holdings and the form of their industry, itself largely dependent on the size of the parcel of land controlled. The feudal nobility had become great wool-growers with hired laborers instead of feudal tenants for subjects. The gild system, as a form of industrial

activity, had also sunk into impotence, and its functions of industrial regulation had passed into the control of institutions of the central government. Markets and fairs had facilitated intercourse among the people and had laid a broader basis of economic sympathy. The growth of a foreign market had introduced the elements of capital and competition into commerce, to a slight extent, and had broken down the barriers of feudalism and the gilds.' The care and relief of the poor had been taken from the Church and gilds and was now put by the Elizabethan Poor Laws under the control of local organizations of the national state. Except in a few industries, particularly the woollen industry, the development of England down to the middle of the sixteenth century had been internal; the reign of Elizabeth marks the overflowing of the cup of industrial growth; England was now to develop externally. The principles of internal control that had been justly inherited from feudalism and the gilds were now to be consistently applied externally to the relations of Englishmen with foreign peoples.

The general religious and intellectual activity of the sixteenth century had brought to the knowledge of the English people the existence of a great world of material wealth outside the restricted boundaries of their island, and for the Anglo-Saxon to know of its existence was for him to covet it. The peace and quietude of Elizabeth's long reign permitted a sufficient accumulation of capital in England to enable her people to follow the lead of the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch in the exploitation of new worlds. The distinctive feature of English corporate life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was its development in the relations of English subjects to foreign lands. Internally England had attained forms of

"It was indeed foreign trade which did more than any other force to break down the medieval social order.”—Ashley, English Economic History, vol. ii., p. 392.

industrial life that would suffer little change until near the end of the eighteenth century; externally English life was to pass through forms analogous to the earlier forces of internal industry,—though in a shorter period of time, -and was then to fall into harmony with the general internal system.

The development of foreign commerce was regarded not entirely as a matter of interest and benefit solely to the individuals engaged in it, but even more as a matter of national interest and benefit. The motives that prompted it were three in kind, (a) industrial, (b) political and (c) philanthropic. (a) The motives were industrial in so far as the foreign commerce was expected to be a source of gain directly to the persons engaged in it and indirectly to the people of England whose economic demands would be more cheaply or fully supplied by it. (b) As there is necessarily a personal element in governments and institutions and their purposes and aims are bound up and identified with the personal purposes and aims of those in whom, for the time, the governmental powers are reposed, and as the individuals themselves who compose a state are inclined to personify their governments and institutions and find in the extension of their powers a source of personal gratification, the English crown directly stimulated and encouraged the growth of foreign commerce with the ultimate purpose of deriving pecuniary gain or more extended dominion from it; in so far as these considerations entered into the extension of foreign commerce, it was prompted by political motives. (c) Again, even the individual or spiritual welfare of the foreign peoples (in some cases savages) with whom the foreign commerce was to be engaged in, was a weighing consideration; or in the case of colonists, the welfare of depressed classes of the English people was aimed at; these motives, being hardly based on the desire of gain or of more extended dominion, ought to be