devastation to clear a space for him.  As it was, he reformed the representative system in a most judicious manner.  He rendered the administration of justice uniform throughout the island.  We will quote a passage from his speech to the Parliament in September 1656, which contains, we think, simple and rude as the diction is, stronger indications of a legislative mind, than are to be found in the whole range of orations delivered on such occasions before or since.

“There is one general grievance in the nation.  It is the law.  I think, I may say it, I have as eminent judges in this land as have been had, or that the nation has had for these many years.  Truly, I could be particular as to the executive part, to the administration; but that would trouble you.  But the truth of it is, there are wicked and abominable laws that will be in your power to alter.  To hang a man for sixpence, threepence, I know not what,—­to hang for a trifle, and pardon murder, is in the ministration of the law through the ill framing of it.  I have known in my experience abominable murders quitted; and to see men lose their lives for petty matters!  This is a thing that God will reckon for; and I wish it may not lie upon this nation a day longer than you have an opportunity to give a remedy; and I hope I shall cheerfully join with you in it.”

Mr. Hallam truly says that, though it is impossible to rank Cromwell with Napoleon as a general, “yet his exploits were as much above the level of his contemporaries, and more the effects of an original uneducated capacity.”  Bonaparte was trained in the best military schools; the army which he led to Italy was one of the finest that ever existed.  Cromwell passed his youth and the prime of his manhood in a civil situation.  He never looked on war till he was more than forty years old.  He had first to form himself, and then to form his troops.  Out of raw levies he created an army, the bravest and the best disciplined, the most orderly in peace, and the most terrible in war, that Europe had seen.  He called this body into existence.  He led it to conquest.  He never fought a battle without gaining it.  He never gained a battle without annihilating the force opposed to him.  Yet his victories were not the highest glory of his military system.  The respect which his troops paid to property, their attachment to the laws and religion of their country, their submission to the civil power, their temperance, their intelligence, their industry, are without parallel.  It was after the Restoration that the spirit which their great leader had infused into them was most signally displayed.  At the command of the established government, an established government which had no means of enforcing obedience, fifty thousand soldiers whose backs no enemy had ever seen, either in domestic or in continental war, laid down their arms, and retired into the mass of the people, thenceforward to be distinguished only by superior diligence, sobriety, and regularity in the pursuits, of peace, from the other members of the community which they had saved.