When Cromwell, in January, 1655, dismissed the first Protectorate Parliament, he left himself nothing to do but to establish his own personal rule; in other words, he became a tyrant. Of course the word cannot be used in the sense we use it in describing Ivan the Terrible, or Agathokles. As each country must, sooner or later, obtain exactly that measure of political freedom to which it is entitled, so, when it falls under a tyranny, the tyranny must be strictly conditioned by the character of the people. Cromwell ruled over Englishmen, not Russians or Greeks, and no Englishman would have tolerated for twenty-four hours what was groaningly borne by Muscovites, who had lost every vestige of manhood beneath the Tartar yoke, or by Syracusans, in the days of the rapid decadence of the Hellenistic world. Cromwell’s government was a tyranny because it was based on his own personal rule, his personal decision as to what taxes should be levied, what ordinances issued, what police measures decreed and carried out, what foreign policy adopted or rejected. He was influenced very much by public opinion, when public opinion found definite expression in the action of a body of legislators or of an assembly of officers; but even in such cases he was only influenced, not controlled. In other words, he had gone back to the theory of government professed by the man he had executed, and by that man’s predecessors. There was, however, the tremendous and far-reaching difference, that, whereas the Stuart kings clung to absolute power for the sake of rewarding favorites and of carrying out policies that were hostile to the honor and interest of England, Cromwell seized it with the sincere purpose of exalting the moral law at home and increasing the honor of England’s name abroad. Moreover, he was in fact what no Stuart was, in anything but name: a “king among men,” and his mighty strength enabled him, at least partially, to realize his purpose.

Cromwell doubtless persuaded himself that he was endeavoring to secure what would now be called a constitutional government: one which, in his own words, “should avoid alike the extremes of monarchy and democracy.” He was desirous of paying heed to the wishes of those whom he esteemed the wisest and most honest among the people. He had somewhat of that gift for personal popularity which was so marked a feature of Queen Elizabeth—seemingly the only sovereign whom he admired, among all his predecessors. To the last he kept stirring vaguely for a constitutional system; and he sincerely disliked merely arbitrary rule.

But by the time he became Lord Protector he was too impatient of difference of opinion, too doggedly convinced of his own righteousness and wisdom, to be really fit to carry on a free government. He had sought to introduce the reign of the saints; but when, in the Barebones Parliament, he gathered together the very men whom he deemed their arch-representatives, it was only to find, as was of course inevitable, that he and they could not agree as to the method of realizing the reign of the saints in this very material world. Then he sought to secure a government by the representatives of the people: only to find that he got along even less well with them than with the saints. In short, while he had kept his nobility of purpose, his whole character had grown less and less such as to fit him to found a government of the kind toward which his race was dimly striving.

He made varied experiments for the control of England. After the first Protectorate Parliament had been abolished, he established the government of the major-generals, or in other words, purely military rule; dividing England into a dozen districts, with a major-general over each as the ultimate authority. The prime function of the major-generals was to keep order, and they crushed under their iron heels every spark of Royalist insurrection, or of Leveller and Anabaptist uprising. They interfered in civil matters also, and were especially required to see to the rigid observance of the Sabbath, and to suppress all cock-fighting, horse-racing, and kindred sports, as well as to shut up doubtful ale-houses. There certainly never was a more extraordinary despotism than this; the despotism of a man who sought power, not to gratify himself, or those belonging to him, in any of the methods to which all other tyrants have been prone; but to establish the reign of the Lord, as he saw it. Here was a tyrant who used the overwhelming strength of his military force to forbid what he considered profane amusements, and to enforce on one day of the week a system of conduct which was old-Jewish in character. Of course the fact that he meant well, and that his motives were high, did not make it any the easier for the people with whose pleasures and prejudices he thus irritatingly interfered.

The Puritan passion for regulating, not merely the religion, but the morals and manners of their neighbors, especially in the matter of Sunday observance and of pastimes generally, was peculiarly exasperating to men of a more easy-going nature. Even nowadays, the effort for practical reform in American city government is rendered immeasurably more difficult by the fact that a considerable number of the best citizens are prone to devote their utmost energies, not to striving for the fundamentals of social morality, civic honesty, and good government, but, in accordance with their own theory of propriety of conduct, to preventing other men from pursuing what these latter regard as innocent pleasures; while, on the other hand, a large number of good citizens, in their irritation at any interference with what they feel to be legitimate pastimes, welcome the grossest corruption and misrule rather than submit to what they call “Puritanism.” When this happens, before our eyes, we need not wonder that in Cromwell’s day the determination of the Puritans to put down ale-houses and prohibit every type of Sunday pastime, irritated large bodies of the people to the point of longing for the restoration of the Stuarts, no matter what might be the accompanying evils of corruption and tyranny.

The experiment of governing by the major-generals provoked such mutterings of discontent that it had to be abandoned. Another parliament was summoned, and out of this Oliver arbitrarily kept any man whom he did not think ought to come in. It was anything but a radical body, and after declaring against the rule of the major-generals, it offered Oliver the kingship, an offer to which the army objected, and which Oliver, therefore, refused; but even with this subservient assembly Oliver could not get along, and it finally shared the fate of its predecessor. The objection of the army to the kingship, was partly due to the presence of so many Republican zealots in its ranks; but probably the main reason for the objection was that the army, more or less consciously, realized that its own overmastering importance in the commonwealth would vanish as soon as the man it had made supreme by the sword was changed into a constitutional king.

One by one almost all of Oliver’s old comrades and adherents left him, and he was driven to put his own kinsfolk into as many of the higher places, both in the State and the army, as possible; less from nepotism than from the need of having in important positions men who would do his will, without question. Eventually he had to abandon most of the ideas of political liberty which he had originally championed, and, following the path which the Long Parliament had already trod, he finally established a rigid censorship of the press.

Yet, though it must be freely admitted that in its later years the government of Cromwell was in form and substance a tyranny, it must be no less freely acknowledged that he used with wisdom and grandeur the power he had usurped. The faults he committed were the faults of the age, rather than special to himself, while his sincerity and honesty were peculiarly his own.

He fairly carried out his pledge of healing and settling, and he put through a long series of administrative reforms. In England and Wales his internal administration undoubtedly told for what was of moral and material advantage to the country; and if there was heavy taxation, at least it produced visible and tangible results, which was never the case under the Stuarts, before or after him. Yet his rule could not but produce discontent. In the first place, the Royalists were not well treated. In that age the beaten party was expected to pay heavily for its lack of success, both in purse and in body; and it was not to be expected that the victorious Puritans should show toward their defeated foes the generosity displayed by Grant and his fellow-victors in the American Civil War. In the American Revolution, the Tories were at first followed with much the same vindictiveness that the Royalists were followed after King Charles had been brought to the block. But Washington and all the leading American statesmen disapproved of this, and after the first heat of passion was over the American Royalists were allowed precisely the same civil and political rights as their neighbors. On the contrary, in England, under the Commonwealth, the Royalists were kept disfranchised, and taxation was arranged so as always to fall with crushing weight upon them, thus insuring their permanent alienation. As regards the rest of the people, while there was considerable interference with political and religious liberty, it was probably only what the times demanded, and was certainly much less than occurred in almost any other country. Episcopalians were denied the use of the Prayer-Book, and, like the Catholics, were given liberty of conscience only on condition that they should not practise their faith in public. Irritating though this was, and wrong though it was, it fell infinitely short of what had been done to Protestants, under Queen Mary, by the temporarily victorious Catholics, or to Puritans and Catholics under Queen Elizabeth, or of what was to be done to the Covenanters of Scotland, under the victorious Episcopalians; but such considerations would not have altered the discontent, even had the discontented kept them in mind. When provocation is sufficient to drive a man into revolution, it matters little in practical politics how much beyond this point it is carried. The breaking-point is reached sooner in some nations than in others; but in all strong nations persecution will cause revolt long before it takes the terrible form given it by Spaniards and Turks; and, once the war is on, the men who revolt hate any persecutor so much that there is scant room for intensification of the feeling. Moreover, instead of the Cromwellian government growing more, it grew less tolerant of Catholicism and Episcopacy as time went on.

The people at large were peculiarly irritated by what were merely the defects inevitably incident to the good features of Puritanism in that age. When faith is very strong and belief very sincere, men must possess great wisdom, broad charity, and the ability to learn by experience, or else they will certainly try to make others live up to their own standards. This would be bad enough, even were the standards absolutely right; and it is necessarily worse in practice than in theory, inasmuch as mixed with the right there is invariably an element of what is wrong or foolish. The extreme exponents and apologists of any fervent creed can always justify themselves, in the realm of pure logic, for insisting that all the world shall be made to accept and act up to their standards, and that they must necessarily strive to bring this about, if they really believe what they profess to believe. Of course, in practice, the answer is that there are hundreds of different creeds, or shades of creeds, all of which are believed in with equal devoutness by their followers, and therefore in a workaday government it is necessary to insist that none shall interfere with any other. Where people are as far advanced in practical good sense and in true religious toleration as in the United States to-day, the great majority of each creed gradually grows to accept this position as axiomatic, and the smaller minority is kept in check without effort, both by law and by public opinion.

In Cromwell’s time, such law did not obtain in any land, and public opinion was not ripe for it. He was far in advance of his fellow-Englishmen. He described their attitude perfectly, and indeed the attitude of all Europe, when he remarked: “Every sect saith, Oh, give me liberty! but, given it and to spare, he will not yield it to anyone else. Liberty of conscience is a natural right, and he that would have it ought to give it.... I desire it from my heart; I have prayed for it; I have watched for the day to see union and right understanding between the Godly people—Scots, English, Jews, Gentiles, Presbyterians, Independents, Anabaptists, and all.”

The whole principle of religious toleration is summed up in these brief sentences. In his higher and better moments, and far more than most men of his generation, Cromwell tried to live up to them. When Mazarin, the great French cardinal, in responding to Cromwell’s call for toleration of the Vaudois, asked toleration for English Catholics, Cromwell answered, truly, that he had done all he could in face of the hostile spirit of the people, and more than had before been done in England. Of course the position of the English Catholics was beyond all comparison better than that of the Vaudois; but in such a controversy the ugly fact was that neither side would grant to others what it demanded for itself. To the most persecuted of all peoples Cromwell did render a signal service. He connived at the settlement of Jews in London, after having in vain sought to bring about their open toleration.

In Scotland, the rule of the Protector wrought unmixed good. There was no persecution and no interference with religious liberty, save in so far as the restraint of persecution and intolerance could itself be called such. Monk, and Dean, after him, as Cromwell’s lieutenants, did excellent work, and even cautiously endeavored to mitigate the horrors of the persecutions for witchcraft—for these horrible manifestations of superstition were then in full force in Scotland, even more than in either old or New England.

On the whole, then, England and Scotland fared well under Oliver Cromwell—“Old Noll,” as he was affectionately called by his mainstay, the army. In Ireland, the case was different. Materially, even in Ireland, the conditions greatly improved during the Protectorate, because order was rigidly preserved and law enforced; and any system which secured order and law was bound to bring about a temporary bettering of conditions when contrasted with the frightful anarchy which had preceded it. Anarchy always serves simply as the handmaiden of despotism, as those who bring it about should know. But the religious element in the Irish problem rendered it insoluble by the means then adopted for its solution. Cromwell was not responsible for introducing the methods known by his name. They were the methods then universally in use by the representatives of every victorious nationality or religion, in dealing with a beaten foe. The only difference was that Cromwell’s immense energy and power enabled him to apply them with dreadful effectiveness.

In England, Cromwell stood for religious toleration, so far as he was able. Fanatics who thought themselves incarnations of the Saviour, or prophets of a new dispensation, or who indulged in indecent or seditious conduct, or who disturbed the public peace by breaking into regular churches, of course had to be suppressed. Nowadays, most offenders of this type would be ignored, and, if not, they would simply be arrested by the police, in the course of the ordinary exercise of the police power, just as any other disturbers of the peace are arrested. In those days, however, such offenders would have been punished with death in Spain, Italy, or Austria; and, indeed, in most continental countries. In the England of Cromwell, they were merely temporarily imprisoned. The attitude of mind, both of the public generally and of the best and most religious people, toward Unitarians, Socinians, and those who would nowadays be called Free-Thinkers, was purely mediÆval; and even Cromwell could only moderate the persecution to which they were subjected. But these were minor exceptions. For the majority of the people in England, there was religious liberty; and for the bulk of the minority, though there was not complete religious liberty, there was a nearer approach to it than obtained in Continental Europe.

In Ireland, on the other hand, the public exercise of the faith of the enormous majority was prohibited, and their religious teachers expelled. There is a popular belief that under Cromwell all Irishmen were expelled from three-fourths of the island, and driven into Connaught, their places being taken by English and Scotch immigrants. While exceedingly cruel, this would have been an understandable policy, and would have resulted in the substitution of one race and one creed for another race and another creed throughout the major part of the island. What was actually done, however, combined cruelty with ultimate inefficiency; it caused great immediate suffering, while perpetuating exactly the conditions against which it was supposed to provide. The Catholic landholders were, speaking generally, driven into Connaught, and the priests expelled, while the peasants, laborers, and artisans were left as they were, but of course deprived of all the leadership which could give them a lift upward. In Ulster there had been a considerable substitution of one race for the other, among the actual tillers and occupiers of the soil. Under Cromwell, the change elsewhere consisted in the bringing in of alien landlords. In other words, to the already existing antagonism of race, creed, and speech, was added the antagonism of caste. The property-holder, the landlord, the man of means, was an Englishman by race and speech, and a Protestant by faith; while the mass of the laborers roundabout him were Catholic Celts who spoke Erse. Ultra admirers of Cromwell and the Puritans have actually spoken as if this plan, provided only that it had been allowed to work long enough, would have produced a Puritan Ireland. There was never the remotest chance of its producing such an effect. The mass of the Irish, when all their native teachers were removed, did gradually tend to adopt English as their tongue, but their devotion to their own faith, and their hatred of English rule, were merely intensified; while the course of the governing race was such as absolutely to insure the land troubles which have riven Ireland up to the present day. The very unedifying intolerance of the Protestant sects toward one another was manifested as strongly in Cromwell’s time as later. It must be said for him that he did not, like his successors for generations, shape English policy toward Ireland on the lines of Spain’s policy toward her own colonies, and oppress the Protestant descendants of the English in Ireland only less than the native Irish themselves; but the great central fact remains that his Irish policy was one of bitter oppression, and that the abhorrence with which the Irish, to this day, speak of “the curse o’ Crummle,” is historically justifiable.

It is a relief to turn from the Cromwellian policy in Ireland to the Cromwellian policy in foreign affairs. England never stood higher in her relations with the outside world than she stood under Cromwell; a height all the more noteworthy because it lay between the two abysses marked by the policy of the earlier and the later Stuart kings. The French biographer of the great Turenne, du Buisson, Major of the Regiment de Verdelin, writing in the days of Charles II., when England was despised rather than hated on the Continent, spoke with a mixture of horror and fear of Cromwell, as the man who “aprÈs l’attentat le plus Énorme dont on a jamais ouÏ parler, avoit trouvÉ le secret de se faire craindre, non seulement des Anglois, mais encore des Princes voisins.” This was written as expressing the attitude of the power with which he was in alliance, and from it may be gathered how those felt who were opposed to him.

Cromwell’s strong religious feelings and military instincts, alike bade him meddle in the policy of the Continent. The era of the great religious wars was closed. More than a century was to pass before the era of religious persecution was to cease, but the time had gone by when one Christian country would try, by force of arms, to conquer another for the purpose of stamping out its religious belief. Cromwell, however, did not see this, and he naturally chose as his special opponent the power which itself was equally blind to the fact—that is, Spain. Beyond a question, he was influenced partly by the commercial and material interests of England in the policy he pursued, but the religious motive was uppermost in his own mind, and he never could get over the feeling that it ought to be uppermost in the minds of everyone else. The very able Swedish King, Charles X., was then pursuing the fatal policy of the Swedish kings of that century, and was endeavoring to conquer territory at the expense of the Danes and North Germans, instead of establishing, to the east and southeast of the Baltic, a dominion which could hold its own against Russia. Cromwell selected the Swede as the natural enemy of Antichrist, and wished to back him in a general religious war. He was amusingly irritated with the English, because they would not feel as he did, and even more with the Dutch, Danes, and Brandenburgers for declining to let themselves be made the tools of the northern king’s ambition.

The great European struggle of the day, however, was that between Spain and France, and for some time Cromwell hesitated which side to take. He has often been blamed for not striking against France, the rising power, whose then youthful king was at a later day to threaten all Europe, and only to be held in check by coalitions in which England was the chief figure. But, though France persecuted the Huguenots more or less, just as England did the Irish Catholics, she was far more advanced than Spain, which was the most bigoted and reactionary power of Europe, both in religion and in politics. The Spanish empire was still very great. Though her power on sea had gone, on land she had on the whole held her own against the French armies, and, with England as her ally, she might for the time being have remained the leading power of the Continent. This would have been a frightful calamity, and Cromwell was right in throwing the weight of his sword on the other side of the scale.

His decision enabled him to do one of the most righteous of his many righteous deeds. It was at this time that the Duke of Savoy, under ecclesiastical pressure, indulged in dreadful persecutions of the humble Protestants of the Vaudois valleys; persecutions which called forth the noblest of Milton’s sonnets. Oliver interfered, with fiery indignation, on behalf of the Vaudois, threatening that if the persecutions continued he would not only bring the pressure of the English arms to bear, but would hire a great force of mercenaries among the Protestant Swiss to invade the territory of the Duke of Savoy. Largely through the influence of Mazarin he succeeded in having the wrong partially undone; and later, in the middle of the operations against the Spanish armies, he again interfered, effectively, with the Cardinal-Statesman on behalf of his obscure and helpless co-religionists in the remote mountain valleys. This action was purely disinterested; and those who are loudest in their denunciation of Cromwell would do well to remember that, if the European rulers at the end of the nineteenth century had possessed his capacity for generous indignation on behalf of the oppressed, the Armenian massacres either would never have taken place, or would have been followed by the immediate expulsion of the Turk from Europe.

Oliver’s first contest with the Spaniards was carried on by sea, the great Puritan Admiral, Blake, winning renown by his victory over the forts at Santa Cruz, as he had already won renown by the way in which he crushed the forces of Tunis, and for the first time taught the Moors to respect English arms. An expedition against San Domingo by Penn and Venables failed, the English leaders being treacherous and inefficient, but it resulted in the capture of Jamaica and the founding of English power in the West Indies. On land, as the result of the convention with France, the English fleet deprived the Spaniards in the Netherlands of assistance from the sea, while an English force of 6,000 troops, clad in the red uniform which has since become distinctive of the British army, was sent to serve under Turenne. They overthrew the flower of the Spanish infantry, and won the heartiest praise from the great French leader. The help given by Cromwell was decisive; the Spaniards were beaten and forced to make peace. By this peace France became the first power on the Continent, but a power heartily afraid of England while Cromwell lived, and obliged to yield him Dunkirk as the price of his services. The possession of Dunkirk put a complete stop to the piracy which had ravaged British commerce, and gave to Cromwell a foothold on the Continent which rendered him able to enforce from his neighbors whatever consideration the honor and interest of England demanded.

Meanwhile, the tone of his Court was a model of purity and honesty. Alone among the Courts of Europe in that age, under Cromwell no man could rise who was profligate in private life, or corrupt in public life. How he had risen socially is shown by the fact that his remaining daughters now married into the nobility. His domestic relations were exceptionally tender and beautiful, and his grief at the loss of his mother and his favorite daughter—his favorite son was already dead—was very great. His letters to and about his sons are just what such letters should be. He explains that he does not grudge them “laudable recreations nor honorable carriage in them,” nor any legitimate expense, but that he does emphatically protest against “pleasure and self-satisfaction being made the business of a man’s life.”

The time had now come, however, when Oliver was to leave alike the family for whom he had so affectionately cared, and the nation he had loved and ruled, and go before the God to whom he ever felt himself accountable. When 1658 opened, peace and order obtained at home, and the crown had been put to England’s glory abroad by the victories in Flanders and the cession of Dunkirk. There was not the slightest chance of Cromwell’s hold on the nation being shaken. So far as human eye could see, his policy was sure to triumph, as long as he lived; but he was weakened by his hard and strenuous life, and the fever, by which he had been harassed during his later campaigns, came on him with renewed force. Even his giant strength had been overtaxed by the task of ruling England alone, and, as he conscientiously believed, for her highest interest. Supreme though his triumph seemed to outsiders, he himself knew that he had failed to make the effects of this triumph lasting, though he never seems to have suspected that his failure was due to his incapacity to subordinate his own imperious will so that he might work with others. He saw clearly the chaos into which his death would plunge England, and he did not wish to die; but as he grew weaker he felt that his hour was come, and surrendered himself to the inevitable.

“I would be willing to live to be further serviceable to God and His people,” muttered the dying ruler, showing, as ever, his strange mixture of belief in himself and trust in the Most High; “but my work is done! Yet God will be with His people!”

September came in with a terrible storm, the like of which had rarely been known in England, and as it subsided, on September 3d, the day which had witnessed the victories of Dunbar and Worcester, the soul of the greatest man who has ruled England, since the days of the Conquest, passed quietly away.^[2]

With his death came the chaos he had foreseen, though he had not foreseen that it could be averted only by the substitution of some form of self-government by the people, for the arbitrary rule of one man—however great and good that man might be. For a few months his son, Richard, ruled as Protector in his stead, but, the Protectorate having become in effect a despotism, it was sure to slip from any but Oliver’s iron grasp. Richard called a Parliament, but Parliaments had been hopelessly discredited by Oliver’s method of dealing with them. The army revolted, forced the dismissal of the Parliament, and then the abdication of Richard. Richard’s abler brother, Henry, who was governing Ireland as deputy, resigned also, and the Cromwells passed out of history.

For some months there was confusion worse confounded, and the whole nation turned toward Charles II., and the re-establishment of the Stuart kingship. Monk, the ablest of Cromwell’s generals, a soldier who cared little for forms of civil government, who had already fought for the Stuarts against the Parliament, and who would have stood by Richard had Richard possessed the strength to stand by himself, threw his weight in favor of the exiled king, and thereby prevented the slightest chance of opposition. Charles II. returned, greeted with transports of frantic delight by seemingly almost the whole people.

The King and his followers then took revenge on the dead body of the man whose living eyes they had never dared to face. The bones of Cromwell, of his mother, and of Ireton, were disinterred and thrown into a lime-pit; and the head of the great Protector was placed on a pole over Westminster Hall, there to stand for twenty years.

The skull of the mighty crown-grasper, before whose untamable soul they had shuddered in terror, was now set on high as a target for the jeering mockery of all who sang the praises of the line of libertines and bigots to whom the English throne had been restored. For twenty-eight shameful years the Restoration lasted; years of misgovernment and persecution at home, of weakness abroad, of oppression of the weak, and obsequious servility to the strong; years when the Court of England—devoid of one spark of true greatness of any kind—was a scene of tawdry and obscene frivolity. Then, once again, the principles for which, in the last analysis, Cromwell and the Puritans stood, triumphed; the Dutch stadtholder came over the narrow seas to ascend the throne of England; and once more the current of her national life set toward political, intellectual, and religious liberty.

Cromwell and the Puritans had gone too far, and the reaction against them had been so violent that those who called William of Orange into England dared not invoke the memory of the mighty dead lest they should hurt the cause of the living. Nevertheless, the Revolution of 1688 was in reality but the carrying on of the work which had been done in the middle of the century. James II. could never have been deposed had not Charles I. been executed. The men of the second Revolution had learned the moderation which the men of the first had lacked. They were careful not to kill the king of whom they wished to rid themselves; for though, by every principle of equity, a tyrant who has goaded his people into Revolution—like the leader of an unjustifiable rebellion—should suffer the fate which he has brought on so many others, yet, as a matter of fact, it is often unwise to treat him as he deserves, because he has become a symbol to his followers, each of whom identifies himself with the man whose cause he has been supporting, and in whose name he has been fighting, and resents, with passionate indignation, any punishment visited upon his chief as a wrong in which he personally shares. The men of 1688 were, as a whole, actuated by far less lofty motives than the men of 1648; but they possessed the inestimable advantages of common-sense, of moderation, of readiness to accept compromises. They made no attempt to realize the reign of the saints upon earth; and therefore they were able to work a permanent betterment in mundane affairs, and to avoid provoking a violent reaction. William, both by position and by temper, was far better fitted than great Oliver to submit to interference with his plans, to get on with representative bodies of freemen, and to make the best he could out of each situation as it arose, instead of indignantly setting his own will above law and above the will of the majority, because for the moment the result might be better for himself and the nation. Speaker Reed once said, that “in the long run, the average sense of the many is better for the many than the best sense of any one man;” and this is undoubtedly true of all people sufficiently high in the scale to be fit for self-government.

Oliver surely strove to live up to his lights as he saw them. He never acted in levity, or from mere motives of personal aggrandizement, and he saw, with sad, piercing eyes, the dangers that rolled around the path he had chosen. He acted as he did because he conscientiously felt that only thus could he meet the needs of the nation. He said to the second Protectorate Parliament: “I am a man standing in the place I am in; which place I undertook, not so much out of hope of doing any good, as out of a desire to prevent mischief and evil—which I did see was imminent on the nation (for we were running along into confusion and disorder, and would have necessarily run into blood).”

We are often told that the best of all possible governments would be a benevolent despotism. Oliver’s failure is a sufficient commentary upon this dictum of the parlor doctrinaires. There never has been, and probably never will be, another despotism where the despot so sincerely strove to do, for a people capable of some measure of freedom, better than they themselves would have done with that freedom. The truth is, that a strong nation can only be saved by itself, and not by a strong man, though it can be greatly aided and guided by a strong man. A weak nation may be doomed anyhow, or it may find its sole refuge in a despot; a nation struggling out of darkness may be able to take its first steps only by the help of a master hand, as was true of Russia, under Peter the Great; and if a nation, whether free or unfree, loses the capacity for self-government, loses the spirit of sobriety and of orderly liberty, then it has no cause to complain of tyranny; but a really great people, a people really capable of freedom and of doing mighty deeds in the world, must work out its own destiny, and must find men who will be its leaders—not its masters. Cromwell could, in all probability, have been such a leader at the end as he was during his early years of public life; and when he permitted himself to fall from the position of a leader among free men, to that of a master over men for whose welfare he sincerely strove, but in whose freedom he did not believe, he marred the great work he had done. Nevertheless, it was a very great work. There are dark blots on his career—especially his Irish policy—but on the whole he was a mighty force for good and against evil, and the good that he did, though buried for the moment with his bones, rose again and has lived for ever since, while the evil has long withered, or is now withering. The English-speaking peoples are free, and for good or for ill hold their destinies in their own hands.

The effect of the attitude which not only the Puritans, but all other Englishmen of every creed, assumed toward Ireland from the days of Queen Mary to the days of King George the Fourth, was such as to steep the island in centuries of misery, and to leave in her people a bitter and enduring hatred against England. Yet this attitude has produced one result of the most unforeseen kind. Had the Irish remained a Celtic nation, separate in speech and government from Great Britain, they could have had no share in the expansion of the English race, or at least could have played only a very subordinate part. As it is, in the great English-speaking commonwealths that have grown up in North America and Australasia, the descendants of the Irish now stand on an exact equality with those of the Scotch and English, and furnish their full proportion of leadership in the government of the communities; while in all these English-speaking countries the Catholic Church has become one of the leading churches and has had its course of development determined by the fact that the controlling force within it has been Irish. The English Protestants failed to impress their creed upon Ireland, but they did impress their language, and did bring Ireland under their own government The strange outcome has been that the creed they hated now flourishes side by side, on equal terms, with the creeds they professed, in the distant continents held in common by their children and by the children of those against whom they warred. In these new continents all, Catholics and Protestants alike, are wedded to the principles of political liberty for which the Puritans fought, and have grown to extend to all creeds the principles of religious liberty in which only the best and most advanced Puritans believed. Let us most earnestly hope that, while avoiding the Puritan fanaticism and intolerance, the Puritan lack of charity and narrowness, we may not lose the Puritan loftiness of soul and stern energy in striving for the right, than which no nation could ever have more precious heritages.

With Oliver’s death his memory passed under a cloud, through which his greatness was to be but dimly seen until generations of men had lived and died. He left many descendants, and there are now in England, and also in America, and possibly Australia, very many men and women, in all ranks of life, who have his blood in their veins—though in the direct line his name has died out. Even during the present century, when among the English upper classes it was still customary to speak of him with horror, his very descendants in certain families felt keen shame for the deeds of their great forefather. With a childishness in no way above that of a Congo savage, it was actually the fashion in some of these families to make the children do penance on the anniversary of the death of Charles II., as a kind of atonement for the deeds of Cromwell. The grotesque nature of this performance is added to by the fact that in that very society a peculiarly high place of honor was accorded to the titled descendants of Charles II. and his mistresses. One hardly knows whether to be most amused or indignant at such fantastic incapacity to appreciate what was really noble and what really ignoble. The men among whom such false conventions obtained could not be expected to see in its true proportions the form of mighty Oliver, looming ever larger across the intervening centuries. Sooner or later, justice will be done him; sooner or later, he will be recognized, not only as one of the greatest of all Englishmen, and by far the greatest ruler of England itself, but as a man who, in times that tried men’s souls, dealt with vast questions and solved tremendous problems; a man who erred, who was guilty of many shortcomings, but who strove mightily toward the light as it was given him to see the light; a man who had the welfare of his countrymen and the greatness of his country very close to his heart, and who sought to make the great laws of righteousness living forces in the government of the world.