showed unmistakably that the regime of Cromwell, though needed for a time, was unpopular, and was not in accordance with the national aspirations.  If they were to be ruled by a tyrant, they preferred to be ruled according to precedents and traditions and hallowed associations.  The English people loved then, as they love now, as they ever have loved, royalty, the reign of kings according to the principles of legitimacy.  They have shown the disposition to fetter these kings, not to dispense with them.

So the experiment of Cromwell and his party failed.  How mournful it must have seemed to the original patriots of the revolution, that hard, iron, military rule was all that England had gained by the struggles and the blood of her best people.  Wherefore had treasures been lavished in a nine years’ contest; wherefore the battles of Marston Moor and Worcester; wherefore the eloquence of Pym and Hampden?  All wasted.  The house which had been swept and garnished was re-entered by devils worse than before.

Thus did this experiment seem; teaching, at least, this useful and impressive lesson,—­that despotism will succeed unwise and violent efforts for reform; that reforms are not to be carried on by bayonets, but by reason; that reformers must be patient, and must be contented with constitutional measures; that any violation of the immutable laws of justice will be visited with unlooked-for retribution.

But sad as this experiment seemed, can it be pronounced to be wholly a failure?  No earnest human experiment is ever thrown away.  The great ideas of Cromwell, and of those who originally took up arms with him, entered into new combinations.  The spirit remained, if the form was changed.  After a temporary reaction, the love of liberty returned.  The second revolution of 1688 was the logical sequence of the first.  It was only another act in the great drama of national development.  The spirit which overthrew Charles I. also overturned the throne of James II.; but the wisdom gained by experience sent him into exile, instead of executing him on the scaffold.  Two experiments with those treacherous Stuarts were necessary before the conviction became fastened on the mind of the English people that constitutional liberty could not exist while they remained upon the throne; and the spirit which had burst out into a blazing flame two generations earlier, was now confined within constitutional limits.  But it was not suppressed; it produced salutary reforms with every advancing generation.  “It produced,” says Macaulay, “the famous Declaration of Right, which guaranteed the liberties of the English upon their present basis; which again led to the freedom of the press, the abolition of slavery, Catholic emancipation, and representative reform,” Had the experiment not been tried by Cromwell and his party, it might have been tried by worse men, whose gospel of rights would be found in the “social contract” of a Rousseau, rather than in the “catechism” of the Westminster