e
also, and you know it went on and came to be a contest whether
the Parliament or the King should rule--whether it should be old
formalities and use and wont, or something that had been of new
conceived in the souls of men--namely, a divine determination to walk
according to the laws of God here as the sum of all prosperity--which
of these should have the mastery; and after a long, long agony of
struggle, it was decided--the way we know. I should say also of that
Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell's--notwithstanding the abuse it has
encountered, and the denial of everybody that it was able to get on in
the world, and so on--it appears to me to have been the most salutary
thing in the modern history of England on the whole. If Oliver
Cromwell had continued it out, I don't know what it would have come
to. It would have got corrupted perhaps in other hands, and could
not have gone on, but it was pure and true to the last fibre in his
mind--there was truth in it when he ruled over it.

Machiavelli has remarked, in speaking about the Romans, that
democracy cannot exist anywhere in the world; as a Government it is an
impossibility that it should be continued, and he goes on proving that
in his own way. I do not ask you all to follow him in his conviction
(hear); but it is to him a clear truth that it is a solecism and
impossibility that the universal mass of men should govern themselves.
He says of the Romans that they continued a long time, but it was
purely in virtue of this item in their constitution--namely, that they
had all the conviction in their minds that it was solemnly necessary
at times to appoint a Dictator--a man who had the power of life and
death over everything--who degraded men out of their places, ordered
them to execution, and did whatever seemed to him good in the name
of God above him. He was commanded to take care that the Republic
suffered no detriment, and Machiavelli calculates that that was the
thing that purified the social system from time to time, and enabled
it to hang on as it did--an extremely likely thing if it was composed
of nothing but bad and tumultuous men triumphing in general over the
better, and all going the bad road, in fact. Well, Oliver Cromwell's
Protectorate, or Dictatorate if you will, lasted for about ten years,
and you will find that nothing that was contrary to the laws of Heaven
was allowed to live by Oliver. (A laugh, and applause.) For example,
it was found by his Parliame