a sensible encouragement for the friends of the government. At Ipswich, when the writ was read, somebody rose and complained of the reference to his Highness's parliament; the king had never called it his parliament; and such an innovation should be a warning not to vote for swordmen nor for the Protector's friends; thereupon another called out that they were all his friends. One opposition candidate assured his audience that his Highness had sent for 3000 Swiss to be his bodyguard; that he had secretly sold the trade of England to the Dutch, and would grant no convoy from Holland ; that most of the counties in England would bring up their numbers in thousands, in spite of Oliver and his redcoats; and that he would wager his life that not five hundred in the whole army would resist them. Another cry was that the free people of England would have no more swordmen, no more decimators, nor anybody in receipt of a salary from the State.

"On Monday last," writes Goffe, "I spoke with Mr. Cole of Southampton, whom I find to be a perfect leveller-he is called by the name of Common Freedom. He told me he was where he was, and where the army was seven years ago, and pulled out of his pocket the Agreement of the People. He told me he would promise me not to disperse any of those books, and that it was his intention to live peaceable, for that he knew a war was not so easily ended as begun. Whereupon with the best exhortation I could give him, I dismissed him for the present. . . . Mr. Cole is very angry at the Spanish war, and saith we deal most ungratefully with them, for that they were so civil to us in the time of our late difference, and that all our trade will be lost."

An energetic manifesto was put out against the government, stating with unusual force the reasons why dear Christian friends and brethren should

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bestir themselves in a day of trouble, rebuke, and blasphemy; why they should make a stand for the pure principles of free-born Englishmen against the power and pomp of any man, however high he might bear himself. Half the books in the Old Testament are made to supply examples and warnings, and Hezekiah and Sennacherib, Jethro and Moses, Esther, Uzzah, Absalom, are all turned into lessons of what a voter should do or abstain from doing. The whole piece gives an instructive glimpse of the state of mind of the generation. Earnest remonstrances are addressed to those who think that God has gone out of parliaments, and that the time for Christ's kingdom is come. Others hold that the Protector had at least given them liberty of conscience in worshipping God, a thing worth all else put together, and a thing that parliament might very likely take away. Some again insist that elections are of no purpose, because the Protector with his redcoats will very soon either make members do what he wants, or else pack them off home again. All these partisans of abstention the despair of party managers in every age-are faithfully dealt with, and the manifesto closes with the hackneyed asseverations of all oppositions ancient and modern, that if only the right sort of parliament were returned burdens would be eased, trade would revive, and the honour of the country now lying in the dust among all nations would be immediately restored. Did not their imprisoned friends speak? Did not their banished neighbours speak? Did not their infringed rights speak? Did not their invaded properties speak? Did not their affronted representatives, who had been trodden upon with scorn, speak? Did not the blood of many thousands speak, some slain with the sword, others killed with hunger-witness Jamaica? Did not the cries of their honest seamen speak, the wall and bulwark of our nation, and now so barbarously

forced from wives and children, to serve the ambitions and fruitless designs of one man?

By way of antidote, the major-generals were armed with letters from the Protector and instructions from Thurloe, and any one found in possession of a bundle of the seditious documents was quickly called to sharp account. Earlier in the summer Sir Henry Vane had put out a pamphlet without his name, which at first was popular, and then on second thoughts was found impracticable, because it simply aimed at the restoration of the Long Parliament. Vane was haled before the Council (21st August), where he admitted the writing and publishing of the Healing Question, though in dark and mysterious terms, as his manner was. He was ordered to give security, refused, and was sent to prison at Carisbrooke, where he lay until the end of the year. An attempt was made to punish Bradshaw by removing him from his office of Chief Justice of Cheshire, but the Council changed their mind. The well-directed activity of the majorgeneral was enough to prevent Bradshaw's return for that county, and he failed elsewhere. So the Protector was free of those who passed for the two leading incendiaries.

The parliament met in September 1656, and Oliver addressed it in one of his most characteristic speeches. He appealed at great length to the hatred of Spain, on the standing ground of its bondage to the Pope; for its evil doings upon Englishmen in the West Indies, for its espousal of the Stuart interest. Then he turned to the unholy friendliness at home between papists, all of them "Spaniolised," and cavaliers; between some of the republicans and the royalists; between some of the Commonwealth men and some of the mire and dirt thrown up by the revolutionary waters. He recalled all the plots and the risings and attempted risings, and warned them against the indolent sup

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position that such things were no more than the nibbling of a mouse at one's heel. For the major - generals and their decimation of royalist delinquents, he set up a stout defence. Why was it not righteous to make that party pay for the suppression of disorder, which had made the charge necessary ? Apart from the mere preservation of the peace, was it not true that the major-generals had been more effectual for discountenancing vice and settling religion than anything done these fifty years? The mark of the cavalier interest was profaneness, disorder, and wickedness; the profane nobility and gentry, that was the interest that his officers had been engaged against. 'If it lives in us, I say, if it be in the general heart, it is a thing I am confident our liberty and prosperity depend upon-reformation of manners. By this you will be more repairer of breaches than by anything in the world. Truly these things do respect the souls of men and the spirits which are the men. The mind is the man. If that be kept pure, a man signifies somewhat; if not, I would very fain see what difference there is between him and a beast."

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In the mighty task that was laid upon them, it was no neutral or Laodicean spirit that would do. With the instinct of a moral leader, with something more than trick of debate or a turn for tactics, Cromwell told them, "Doubting, hesitating men, they are not fit for your work. You must not expect that men of hesitating spirits, under the bondage of scruples, will be able to carry on this work. Do not think that men of this sort will ever rise to such a spiritual heat for the nation as shall carry you a cause like this; as will meet all the oppositions that the devil and wicked men can make." Then he winds up with three high passages from the Psalms, with no particular bearing on their session, but in those days well fitted to exalt

men's hearts, and surrounding temporal anxieties of the hour with radiant visions from another sphere for edification of the diviner mind.

Of the real cause of their assembling, deficit and debt, the Protector judiciously said little. As he observed of himself on another occasion—and the double admission deserves to be carefully marked -he was not much better skilled in arithmetic than he was in law, and his statement of accounts would certainly not satisfy the standards of a modern exchequer. Incapacity of legal apprehension, and incapacity in finance, are a terrible drawback in a statesman with a new state to build. Before business began, the Protector took precautions after his own fashion against the opposition critics. He and the Council had already pondered the list of members returned to the parliament, and as the gentlemen made their way from the Painted Chamber to their House, soldiers were found guarding the door. There was no attempt to hide the iron hand in velvet glove. The clerk of the Commonwealth was planted in the lobby with certificates of the approval of the Council of State. Nearly a hundred found no such tickets, and for them there was no admission. This strong act of purification was legal under the Instrument, and the House, when it was reported, was content with making an order that the persons shut out should apply to the Council for its approbation. The excluded members, of whose fidelity to his government Cromwell could not be sure, comprised a faithful remnant of the Long Parliament; and they and others, ninety-three in number, signed a remonstrance in terms that are a strident echo of the protests that had so often been launched in old days against the king. Vehemently they denounced the practice of the tyrant to use the name of God and religion and formal fasts and prayer, to colour the blackness of the fact; and to command one