ived at any time." He had
shown he knew how to wait, and when waiting was over he showed he knew
how to act. On the eve of the Long Parliament he rode through England to
quicken the electors to a sense of the crisis which had come at last;
and on the assembling of the Commons he took his place, not merely as
member for Tavistock, but as their acknowledged head. Few of the country
gentlemen indeed who formed the bulk of the members, had sat in any
previous House; and of the few none represented in so eminent a way the
Parliamentary tradition on which the coming struggle was to turn. Pym's
eloquence, inferior in boldness and originality to that of Eliot or
Wentworth, was better suited by its massive and logical force to
convince and guide a great party; and it was backed by a calmness of
temper, a dexterity and order in the management of public business, and
a practical power of shaping the course of debate, which gave a form and
method to Parliamentary proceedings such as they had never had before.

[Sidenote: His political theory.]

Valuable however as these qualities were, it was a yet higher quality
which raised Pym into the greatest, as he was the first, of
Parliamentary leaders. Of the five hundred members who sate round him at
St. Stephen's, he was the one man who had clearly foreseen, and as
clearly resolved how to meet, the difficulties which lay before them. It
was certain that Parliament would be drawn into a struggle with the
Crown. It was probable that in such a struggle the House of Commons
would be hampered, as it had been hampered before, by the House of
Lords. The legal antiquarians of the older constitutional school stood
helpless before such a conflict of co-ordinate powers, a conflict for
which no provision had been made by the law, and on which precedents
threw only a doubtful and conflicting light. But with a knowledge of
precedent as great as their own, Pym rose high above them in his grasp
of constitutional principles. He was the first English statesman who
discovered, and applied, to the political circumstances around him, what
may be called the doctrine of constitutional proportion. He saw that as
an element of constitutional life Parliament was of higher value than
the Crown; he saw too that in Parliament itself the one essential part
was the House of Commons. On these two facts he based his whole policy
in the contest which followed. When Charles refused to act with the
Parliament, Pym treated