Parliament recalled or this chosen Council must be a mutual League and Oath, private or public, not to desert one another till death:  that is to say that the Army be kept up and all these Officers in their places during life, and so likewise the Parliament or Councillors of State; which will be no way unjust, considering their known merits on either side, in Council or in Field, unless any be found false to any of these two principles, or otherwise personally criminous in the judgment of both parties.  If such a union as this be not accepted on the Army’s part, be confident there is a Single Person underneath.  That the Army be upheld the necessity of our affairs and factions will [at any rate] constrain long enough perhaps to content the longest liver in the Army.  And whether the Civil Government be an annual Democracy or a perpetual Aristocracy is not to me a consideration for the extremities wherein we are, and the hazard of our safety from our common enemy, gaping at present to devour us.  That it be not an Oligarchy, or the Faction of a few, may be easily prevented by the numbers of their own choosing who may be found infallibly constant to those two conditions forenamed—­full Liberty of Conscience and the Abjuration of Monarchy proposed; and the well-ordered Committees of their faithfullest adherents in every county may give this Government the resemblance and effects of a perfect Democracy.  As for the Reformation of Laws and the Places of Judicature, whether to be here, as at present, or in every county, as hath been long aimed at, and many such proposals tending no doubt to public good, they may be considered in due time, when we are past these pernicious pangs, in a hopeful way of health and firm constitution.  But, unless these things which I have above proposed, one way or other, be once settled, in my fear (which God avert!), we instantly ruin, or at best become the servants of one or other Single Person, the secret author and fomenter of these disturbances.”

There is considerable boldness in these proposals of Milton, and yet a cast of practicality which is unusual with him.  They prove again, if new proof were needed, that he was not a Republican of the conventional sort.  He glances, indeed, at the possibility of an “Annual Democracy,” i.e. a future succession of annual Parliaments, or at least of annual Plebiscites for electing the Government.  But he rather dismisses that possibility from his calculations; and moreover, even had he entertained it farther, we know that the Parliaments or Plebiscites he would have allowed would not have been “full and free,” but only guarded representations of the “well-affected” of the community,—­to wit, the Commonwealth’s-men.  But the Constitution to which he looks forward with most confidence, and which he ventures to think might answer all the purposes of a perfect democracy, is one that should consist of two perpetual or life aristocracies at the centre,—­one a civil aristocracy in