ABSTRACT
The division in English society most nearly corresponding to that chasm which on the continent divided the nobles from the remainder of mankind, was not nobleman and commoner, but gentle and simple. While the English custom of primogeniture forbade the younger sons to live on the family estate, they were not forbidden, like the children of noble houses on the continent, to seek their fortunes in commerce. England was already ahead of other countries in the liberty allowed to women, and the freedom of social intercourse between the sexes, on which both Germans and Italians remarked with surprise. The clumsy machine of English police, judicature, and punishment maintained social order through the political convulsions of the century, but at the expense of the continual escape of the guilty, and in all probability of the condemnation of the innocent, besides horrible sufferings that the law inflicted confessedly on the merely unfortunate.
