reader's personal
bias, will be found very rarely justified. There was far, very far, less
of tyranny or of liberty involved in the contest, up to 1642, than
partisans aver. To the actual actors (nor, as retrospectively criticized
by us) it is a fair battle on both sides, not a contest 'between light
and darkness.'

We, looking back after two centuries, are of course free to recognize,
that one effect of the Tudor despotism had been to train Englishmen
towards ruling themselves;--we may agree that the time had come for Lords
and Commons to take their part in the Kingdom. But no proof, I think it
may be said, can be shown that this great idea, in any conscious sense,
governed the Parliaments of James and Charles. It is we who,--reviewing
our history since the definite establishment of the constitutional
balance after 1688, and the many blessings the land has enjoyed,--can
perceive what in the seventeenth century was wholly hidden from
Commonwealth and from King. And even if in accordance with the common
belief, we ascribe English freedom and prosperity and good government to
the final triumph of the popular side, yet deeper consideration should
suggest that such retrospective judgments are always inevitably made
under our human entire ignorance what might have been the result had the
opposite party prevailed. Who should say how often, in case of these
long and wide extended struggles,--political and dynastic,--the effects
which we confidently claim as _propter hoc_, are only _post hoc_ in the
last reality?

Waiving however these somewhat remote and what many will judge
over-sceptical considerations, this is certain, that unless we can purify
our judgment from reading into the history of the past the long results
of time;--from ascribing to the men of the seventeenth century prophetic
insight into the nineteenth;--unless, in short, we can free ourselves
from the chain of present or personal prepossessions;--no approach can be
made to a fair or philosophical judgment upon such periods of strife and
crisis as our Civil War preeminently offers.

C: p. 108

_With glory he gilt_; Yet to readers, (if such readers there be) who can
look with an undazzled eye on military success, or hear the still small
voice of truth through the tempest of rhetoric, Cromwell's foreign
policy, (excepting the isolated case of his interference with the then
comparatively feeble powers of Savoy and the Papacy on behalf of the
perse