blish itself, or try to establish itself,
in this land!

For three years, Cromwell says, this question had been sounded in the
ears of the Parliament. They could make no answer; nothing but talk,
talk. Perhaps it lies in the nature of parliamentary bodies; perhaps
no Parliament could in such case make any answer but even that of
talk, talk! Nevertheless the question must and shall be answered. You
sixty men there, becoming fast odious, even despicable, to the whole
nation, whom the nation already calls Rump Parliament, _you_ cannot
continue to sit there: who or what then is to follow? 'Free
Parliament,' right of Election, Constitutional Formulas of one sort or
the other,--the thing is a hungry Fact coming on us, which we must
answer or be devoured by it! And who are you that prate of
Constitutional Formulas, rights of Parliament? You have had to kill
your King, to make Pride's Purges, to expel and banish by the law of
the stronger whosoever would not let your Cause prosper: there are but
fifty or three-score of you left there, debating in these days. Tell
us what we shall do; not in the way of Formula, but of practicable
Fact!

How they did finally answer, remains obscure to this day. The diligent
Godwin himself admits that he cannot make it out. The likeliest is,
that this poor Parliament still would not, and indeed could not
dissolve and disperse; that when it came to the point of actually
dispersing, they again, for the tenth or twentieth time, adjourned
it,--and Cromwell's patience failed him. But we will take the
favourablest hypothesis ever started for the Parliament; the
favourablest, though I believe it is not the true one, but too
favourable.

According to this version: At the uttermost crisis, when Cromwell and
his Officers were met on the one hand, and the fifty or sixty Rump
Members on the other, it was suddenly told Cromwell that the Rump in
its despair _was_ answering in a very singular way; that in their
splenetic envious despair, to keep-out the army at least, these men
were hurrying through the House a kind of Reform Bill,--Parliament to
be chosen by the whole of England; equable electoral division into
districts; free suffrage, and the rest of it! A very questionable, or
indeed for _them_ an unquestionable thing. Reform Bill, free suffrage
of Englishmen? Why, the Royalists themselves, silenced indeed but not
exterminated, perhaps out_number_ us; the great numerical majority of
England was always i