only choice among nominees sent down to them by a higher power?  Should Harrington’s principle of Rotation be adopted, and, if so, to what extent?  Farther, whatever was to be the structure of the Parliament, were any fundamentals to be laid down beforehand, as eternal principles of the Commonwealth, which even the Parliament should be bound not to touch?  Must not the perpetuity of Republican Government itself, or non-return to Kingship or single Chief Magistracy of any kind, be one of these fundamentals, and Liberty of Conscience another?  Nay, should a Church Establishment and Tithes be left open questions, or should there be some absolute pre-determination on that great subject?  Finally, when the Sub-Committee and the Committee of Safety, and the Army officers round about, should have agreed upon all these questions, so far as to be able to draw out a Constitution or Form of Government sufficiently satisfactory to themselves, ought not that Constitution to be submitted to some wider representative authority for revision and ratification before being imposed on the People?  If so, what should that intervening and ratifying authority be?[1]

[Footnote 1:  This is not a paragraph of suppositions, but the result of a study of the actual chaos of opinion at the moment, by the help of hints from Whitlocke, Ludlow, the letters of M. de Bordeaux, and information in contemporary Thomason pamphlets.  Strangely enough, some of the most luminous hints come from the letters of M. de Bordeaux.  He was observing all coolly and clearly with foreign eyes, and reporting twice a week to Mazarin.]

One can see that there were two parties among the debaters.  Vane, in his strange position at last after his many vicissitudes, had come trailing clouds of his peculiar notions with him, and was regarded as the advocate of wild and impracticable novelties.  Not merely absolute Liberty of Conscience and abolition of Tithes, in which Ludlow and others went with him, but certain Millenarian or Fifth Monarchy speculations, pointing to a glorious future over the trampled ruins of the Church-Establishment and of much besides, were ideas which he wanted to ingraft in some shape into the new Constitution.  Here he represented a number of enthusiasts among the subalterns of the Army and among ex-Army men; and, indeed, it had been with some difficulty that Major-General Harrison, the head of the Millenarians, had been kept out of the Committee of Safety at its first formation, and so prevented from resuming public functions after his five years of disablement.  Not having Harrison by his side, Vane could do little more than ventilate his Millenarianism, Communism, or whatever it was, though, as Whitlocke says, he “was hard to be satisfied and did much stick to his own apprehensions.”  The leader of the more moderate party, as against Vane, was Whitlocke himself.  He represented the Lawyers, the Established Clergy, all the more sober and conservative spirits.