political rules, when decisions had to be taken suddenly and often in the dark, a man of excellent intentions may find himself in a very questionable position, and all the more easily if he has the kind of prompt, daring character which most insures immediate success. The quickest runner, once on the wrong road, will go furthest astray. When Cromwell began to take the lead the allimportant decision had been already taken. Civil war had been entered on. If this decision was wrong, Cromwell was from the beginning on the wrong road. It is easy for historians in a quiet time to criticise and condemn the daring deeds of a great man thus hopelessly entangled; but there is something to my mind pharisaical in the "high tone of morality" which such historians pride themselves on preserving. I therefore go heartily with Mr. Carlyle when he discards the carping, fault-finding, moralising tone of former writers on Cromwell, and am quite willing to accept all that he urges in proof of his hero's nobleness, gentleness, and sincerity of character.

But when I have conceded all this to Mr. Carlyle, it seems to me that the question of Cromwell's work as a statesman, and of his position in English history, remains still to be discussed. He himself may have been good, and yet his system very bad. His career may have been well-intentioned and morally excusable, and yet it may have been a great mistake. He may be a grand figure for the imagination to contemplate, and yet his system of politics may have been mischievous. This is what the literary man writing history can never be brought to conceive. The great man to him is always the man who makes a striking figure on the historical stage. It is this misconception which has led the French to Napoleonism, and evidently the English counterpart of that illusion is Mr. Carlyle's theory of Cromwell.

The question I propose is, What

would a Radical historian such as Grote have said about Cromwell? Let us put aside entirely all oldfashioned constitutional prejudices, from which no doubt Hallam is by no means free; but let us put aside at the same time all the new-fashioned prejudices to which Mr. Carlyle is a slave, the taste for strong literary sensations, for stirring incidents and strong characters. Let us be politicians, not poets, and with this determination let us ask ourselves what we think of the Great Rebellion, of Cromwell, and of the Restoration. There are many points on which I for my part suspend my judgment. Among these is the all-important question whether the final breach between Parliament and King in the last months of 1641 was not really unavoidable. It is useless to discuss this until M1. Gardiner has told us all he knows. The panic on the side of the parliamentary leaders was extreme, and by no means unreasonable. If the course they took was extreme, the necessity appeared to them, and could not but appear to them, extreme also. They might feel that they had only a choice of evils. Here, as in the principal acts of Cromwell, the moral question is intricate if not insoluble. But the principal political questions, whether the Civil War, unavoidable or not, was likely to lead to a good result; whether the military party, honest or not, had a right to suppress liberty in England; whether the militarism of Cromwell, well-intentioned or not, was a good form of government; and, lastly, whether the Restoration of Charles II., whatever we think of his character, or of the profligacy of his court, was salutary or not,-these are questions which there need be no difficulty in deciding. It seems to me that an intelligent Radical would answer all these questions in almost exactly the same way as they were answered by Hallam. He would say that, as a matter of course, the military government, whether in its first nominally republican form, or in the open im

perialism of Cromwell, was a most bad and fatal system, and that, as a matter of course, the Restoration was a most necessary and salutary measure, by which all that was good in England was saved from destruction.

The Restoration was not a return to servitude, but the precise contrary. It was a great emancipation, an exodus out of servitude into liberty. We all, I suppose, know theoretically that there are more forms than one of tyranny, but practically we seem to treat military imperialism as if it were not among these forms. Perhaps because in modern Europe it has always been a short-lived, transient phenomenon, which has disappeared before men have had time to be disgusted with it, or for some other reason, the military tyranny of our Interregnum and of the Napoleons in France has left a slighter impression than the tyranny of the Stuarts and of the Bourbons. In our own case perhaps it is because we confuse the moral with the political question. Morally no doubt it seems hard to speak of Cromwell as a tyrant; morally no doubt it is absurd to class him with James II. But this ought not to tempt us to absolve the military system, or to overlook the fact that in itself it is a far greater scourge, a far more fatal evil, than such arbitrary government as that of the Tudors or of the early Stuarts. As to the later Stuarts, I regard them as pupils of Cromwell. I think that any one who tries to penetrate their design will find that it was their great ambition to appropriate Cromwell's methods for the benefit of the old monarchy. But, as we know, they were unsuccessful pupils. They failed where their model had succeeded, and the distinction of having enslaved England remained peculiar to Cromwell.

As Cromwell was probably no tyrant in intention, so it is no doubt true that in act he was much more than a mere tyrant. I could enlarge, had I space, upon the great results of his statesmanship which remained to England after his tyranny was destroyed. On

condition that it did not last his system might be regarded as beneficial. But had it lasted, had the house of Cromwell established itself in England, I take it that all which has since made the glory of our country would have been lost. England would have become a military state, and the Cromwellian monarchy would have been a sort of Protestant counterpart of the monarchy of Louis XIV. Moreover, when we are estimating the Restoration, we are before all things to remember that the Stuarts did not take the place of the Cromwells, but only of the military anarchy which followed the disappearance of the Cromwells.

It is no less untrue to call the Restoration an apostasy from virtue than to describe it as a return to servitude. I have no fancy whatever to rehabilitate Charles II. or his court, and it is easy to make an effective contrast between the scandals of the Restoration and the decorum of the Interregnum. But George Eliot warns us against that narrow, purely private view of morality to which we are too prone. A nation is demoralised much more by public crimes than by private vices. And whatever excuses may be made for the founders of the military government, whatever reasons we may allege for believing them sincere and well-intentioned, it remains that they had crushed the liberties of the country and established the degrading supremacy of an army. The cause of demoralisation lay here, and especially in the fact that the destruction of liberty had been accomplished in the name of religion. The military government might be decorous, but it was fundamentally immoral. Miscalling itself a republic, it was a tyranny founded on mere force. The Restoration government was presided over by a cynic and a libertine, but the government itself was legitimate in the best sense of the word, for it was founded not only on ancient laws, but also on the hearty, well-nigh unanimous, consent of the people. When therefore we are

told of the relaxation of morals which followed the Restoration, let us inquire what party was responsible for it. Macaulay himself has charged it upon the Puritans, who, according to him, strained the moral bond until it broke. But this explanation, I take it, misses the point. It was not merely their overstrictness that produced immorality by reaction, it was their complicity with tyranny, the share they had had in the destruction of English liberty. As much as it is to be desired that a true religion should control men's politics as well as their private actions, so much the invasion of politics by a crude, confused religious system is to be feared. When a nation has trusted itself to religion, and has been duped, a violent reaction against all religion cannot but set in. The low tone of the Restoration period, the profound mistrust of anything like enthusiasm which reigned for a good century afterwards, had its origin not in the Restoration itself, but in the reign of the Sects, in the grand disappointment of a nation which, by following the party of religion, had lost its liberties.

If I have pursued this subject so far, though it was introduced only by way of illustration, this is because nothing could illustrate more fully my view of the manner in which a corruption of history causes by contagion a corruption of politics. First under pretext of a prophetic gift which has a right to dispense with precision and with logic, a flood of rhetoric and of bastard poetry is let loose over the most important historical subjects. This loose mode of treatment does not, as is supposed, merely affect insignificant details, but blurs or completely misrepresents the large outlines of history. That the military government was a tyranny seems as evident now to those who look calmly at the facts as it seemed evident to almost all Englishmen for a century and a half. But let the subject be treated in a literary manner, that is, let pictures be substituted for reasonings, let persons and

characters occupy the foreground and political reflexion be made subordinate, taking always the form of hints, or short, impassioned comments, or poetical rhapsodies, and it is quite possible to make Cromwellism wear a splendid and glorious appearance. The misrepresentation is at first allowed to pass, because before a public so indifferent to history no historical question can be seriously tried, and then a new generation quietly adopts it because it is more cheerful, more animating, more poetical than the old view. But in adopting it they insensibly adopt a whole scheme of politics, which condemns all the traditional politics of the country. To say that the Great Rebellion was glorious, and the Revolution of 1688 a feeble compromise, is to repudiate in one word what may be called the English method in politics and to adopt the French method in its place. It is to abandon the politics of statesmen for the politics of literary men, for indeed Rebellion v. Revolution is the test-question between the two schools. The Rebellion represents the policy of strong sensations, intense action and passion, affording rich materials to the romancer, but completely unsuccessful, creating a strong tyranny in the effort to resist a weak one, repudiated at last by the whole nation, and consigned to oblivion for more than a century; the Revolution disappoints romancers, but it arrests the attention of political students as furnishing the unique example of a nation in extreme excitement doing precisely the thing it wished to do, and neither more nor less.

But if this ready adoption of Carlylian eccentricities is in itself unworthy of advanced politicians, in particular instances they proclaim it in a style which is positively alarming from the confusion of thought, the helpless somnambulism which it betrays. For they bring up the name of Cromwell at a moment when they are crusading against "imperialism," against jingoism, and the spirited foreign policy, and when they wish to hint that the time

is at hand when it will be desirable to substitute republicanism for monarchy. Now whatever may be open to question in Cromwell's career, it is surely not doubtful that on the one occasion in which Englishmen have tried the experiment of a republic it was Cromwell who stepped forward to crush it, that, having crushed it, he proceeded to reconstruct the monarchy, that, in doing so, he showed a manifest intention of abiding by the old form, and in particular that he restored the House of Lords, but that so far as the Cromwellian monarchy differed from the old English monarchy, it differed by having a much larger infusion of imperialism, and as a natural consequence distinguished itself specially in the department of foreign affairs. The founder of English imperialism and the inventor, if not of jingoism, yet certainly of the spirited foreign policy, is cited with triumph by the opponents of both at the very moment when they are opposing them most warmly!

It is time to collect the results of this paper. We are not political philosophers.' This does not mean that we are less so than most other nations, nor yet that there is not among us a vast amount of political knowledge of a certain kind; nor again that there are not individuals, perhaps fully as numerous as in other countries, whose political knowledge is profound. But it means that the profound knowledge of the few, and the large command of detail on special questions possessed by many, do not together constitute an adequate national knowledge of politics when the larger political questions are thrown open. At such times great masses of men ought to be-what is most difficult-political thinkers, and I have urged

First, that the majority of the working classes are childishly ignorant of the larger political questions. When we are told that our working classes are disposed, almost too much disposed, to learn from their betters and from those who are wiser than themselves, I believe it is overlooked that a little

education and a little power fatally destroy such half-animal half-animal docility. Look at Germany, where the same disposition to reverence and loyalty was once stronger than in England, and see the coarse and furious contempt for all tradition that has sprung up since the introduction of universal suffrage. But, secondly, I urge

That in the educated classes, putting aside the few who devote themselves to politics, there is much less trustworthy and precise knowledge of political principles than is commonly supposed. Our education runs off to classics, belles-lettres, and art on the one side, and to exact science on the other, so that on politics, and that part of history which is closely connected with politics, that is, recent history, they are at the mercy of the fashionable historians of the day, being wholly unable to test the views which such historians put before them. And, thirdly, I have urged—

That in the department of recent history our writers, being dependent for their literary success on the suffrages of the general public, have been compelled to adopt a low standard. They have formed the habit of regarding themselves as popular writers or writers for the young, and have accordingly put all their force into narration and florid description, so as to become, in one word, rather men of style than men of science. The result of this has been not merely to damage the quality of history, but to pervert its judgments to an infinite extent by substituting the literary for the properly political estimate of public men and public actions. And as practically our opinions on the larger political questions depend upon rough conclusions drawn from the more conspicuous historical phenomena, the corruption of history has caused a corruption of the political views of the educated class.

These evils are closely connected among themselves, yet they are not equally easy to remedy. One of them,

however, and that, in my view, the worst of all, if it were once fully recognised, would be remedied without difficulty. The corruption of history has an obvious cause in the absence of any sufficient corps of specialists among whom the true notion of his tory might be preserved, and to whose judgment historians might appeal with confidence. Any other serious study would decline as history has declined if it were left to itself as history has been left. If astronomy were handed over to the judgment of the general public, Airy and Adams would be obliged to give up the use of symbols, and to publish charming poetical books upon the wonders of the heavens; if geology were in the same condition, Ramsay and Geikie would devote themselves to producing nice little volumes on the pleasures of the sea-shore, adapted to amuse families during their summer holiday. History only needs to be protected as other serious studies are protected, or rather it is only one section of history that needs to be so protected. The corruption does not extend to ancient history, where Grote and Curtius and Mommsen have met with due appreciation; even medieval history is affected by it only in a secondary degree, for we are all proud of Professor Stubbs, though not by any means so proud as we ought to be. It is only the recent periods that have been invaded by the literary romancing school, and in which that school is supported by the enthusiastic favour of the public. Unfortunately these are just the periods in which the domain of history confines with that of politics.

This evil, then, would be in a great degree remedied by a considerable increase in the number of teachers and students at the universities, or lecturers proceeding from the universities, who should devote themselves to this part of history; and as the study of history in general is advancing in the universities, this result will be secured if only the special importance of the recent periods is properly

recognised. When this is done, the time will soon arrive when the body of specialists will be strong enough to to guide the popular judgment. More, no doubt, would still be needed to give the study a full degree of vitality and independence, and we must look forward with hope to a time when modern studies on a large scale shall be established in schools as well as in universities. In those days modern history will flourish between modern languages and modern literatures, and there will be some chance of curing nations of their somnambulism when each generation shall be taught seriously and thoroughly to know the world in which it is to live.

In those days the second evil too will be remedied. Not only will history be cured by being put into the hands of specialists, but at the same time the large mass of educated men will be able to form on political questions not merely a common-sense judgment-this is not enough when the questions at issue are fundamental -but a learned judgment. They will be in possession of all the results at which political thinkers have arrived, and in possession also of the facts of history, by which I do not mean the facts of biography, nor yet merely the famous occurrences of history, but the development of institutions and the precise process by which states have prospered or decayed. But even before that time arrives, if only the students of recent history can become more numerous and more influential, an approximation to this result may be made, and the educated class, by having a larger admixture of historical specialists, may make a perceptible advance in the clearness of their political views.

The other evil, it must be confessed, is in its nature irremediable. It is impossible even to conceive the great mass of the working classes educated to the point of having a sound judgment on questions of national policy. Still perhaps even here something