The two Houses, surrounded by the ruins of so many free constitutions overthrown or sapped by the new military system, were required to intrust the command of an army and the conduct of the Irish war to a King who had proposed to himself the destruction of liberty as the great end of his policy.  We are decidedly of opinion that it would have been fatal to comply.  Many of those who took the side of the King on this question would have cursed their own loyalty, if they had seen him return from war; at the head of twenty thousand troops, accustomed to carriage and free quarters in Ireland.

We think with Mr. Hallam that many of the Royalist nobility and gentry were true friends to the Constitution, and that, but for the solemn protestations by which the King bound himself to govern according to the law for the future, they never would have joined his standard.  But surely they underrated the public danger.  Falkland is commonly selected as the most respectable specimen of this class.  He was indeed a man of great talents and of great virtues but, we apprehend, infinitely too fastidious for public life.  He did not perceive that, in such times as those on which his lot had fallen, the duty of a statesman is to choose the better cause and to stand by it, in spite of those excesses by which every cause, however good in itself, will be disgraced.  The present evil always seemed to him the worst.  He was always going backward and forward; but it should be remembered to his honour that it was always from the stronger to the weaker side that he deserted.  While Charles was oppressing the people, Falkland was a resolute champion of liberty.  He attacked Strafford.  He even concurred in strong measures against Episcopacy.  But the violence of his party annoyed him, and drove him to the other party, to be equally annoyed there.  Dreading the success of the cause which he had espoused, disgusted by the courtiers of Oxford, as he had been disgusted by the patriots of Westminster, yet bound by honour not to abandon the cause, for which he was in arms, he pined away, neglected his person, went about moaning for peace, and at last rushed desperately on death, as the best refuge in such miserable times.  If he had lived through the scenes that followed, we have little doubt that he would have condemned himself to share the exile and beggary of the royal family; that he would then have returned to oppose all their measures; that he would have been sent to the Tower by the Commons as a stifler of the Popish Plot, and by the King as an accomplice in the Rye-House Plot; and that, if he had escaped being hanged, first by Scroggs, and then by Jeffreys, he would, after manfully opposing James the Second through years of tyranny, have been seized with a fit of compassion, at the very moment of the Revolution, have voted for a regency, and died a non-juror.

We do not dispute that the royal party contained many excellent men and excellent citizens.  But this we say, that they did not discern those times.  The peculiar glory of the Houses of Parliament is that, in the great plague and mortality of constitutions, they took their stand between the living and the dead.  At the very crisis of our destiny, at the very moment when the fate which had passed on every other nation was about to pass on England, they arrested the danger.