What would become of the state if no one consented to serve it?  Would not everything come to a standstill?  To keep his place is the duty of a good citizen.  Learn to sacrifice your secret preferences.  Appointments must be filled, and some one must necessarily sacrifice himself.  To be faithful to public functions is true fidelity.  The retirement of public officials would paralyse the state.  What! banish yourself!—­how weak!  As an example?—­what vanity!  As a defiance?—­what audacity!  What do you set yourself up to be, I wonder?  Learn that we are just as good as you.  If we chose we too could be intractable and untameable and do worse things than you; but we prefer to be sensible people.  Because I am a Trimalcion, you think that I could not be a Cato!  What nonsense!

III.

Never was a situation more clearly defined or more decisive than that of 1660.  Never had a course of conduct been more plainly indicated to a well-ordered mind.  England was out of Cromwell’s grasp.  Under the republic many irregularities had been committed.  British preponderance had been created.  With the aid of the Thirty Years’ War, Germany had been overcome; with the aid of the Fronde, France had been humiliated; with the aid of the Duke of Braganza, the power of Spain had been lessened.  Cromwell had tamed Mazarin; in signing treaties the Protector of England wrote his name above that of the King of France.  The United Provinces had been put under a fine of eight millions; Algiers and Tunis had been attacked; Jamaica conquered; Lisbon humbled; French rivalry encouraged in Barcelona, and Masaniello in Naples; Portugal had been made fast to England; the seas had been swept of Barbary pirates from Gibraltar to Crete; maritime domination had been founded under two forms, Victory and Commerce.  On the 10th of August, 1653, the man of thirty-three victories, the old admiral who called himself the sailors’ grandfather, Martin Happertz van Tromp, who had beaten the Spanish, had been destroyed by the English fleet.  The Atlantic had been cleared of the Spanish navy, the Pacific of the Dutch, the Mediterranean of the Venetian, and by the patent of navigation, England had taken possession of the sea-coast of the world.  By the ocean she commanded the world; at sea the Dutch flag humbly saluted the British flag.  France, in the person of the Ambassador Mancini, bent the knee to Oliver Cromwell; and Cromwell played with Calais and Dunkirk as with two shuttlecocks on a battledore.  The Continent had been taught to tremble, peace had been dictated, war declared, the British Ensign raised on every pinnacle.  By itself the Protector’s regiment of Ironsides weighed in the fears of Europe against an army.  Cromwell used to say, “I wish the Republic of England to be respected, as was respected the Republic of Rome.”  No longer were delusions held sacred; speech was free, the press was free.  In the public street men said what they listed; they printed what they pleased without control or censorship.  The equilibrium of thrones had been destroyed.  The whole order of European monarchy, in which the Stuarts formed a link, had been overturned.  But at last England had emerged from this odious order of things, and had won its pardon.