r.[10]

But theory is a charge which has ever been urged against
revolutionists. Revolution is the child of speculation. The men of
the seventeenth century are discoverers in politics. Their mark is a
wider empire than that of Vasco da Gama and his king, a realm more
wondrous than that of Aeetes. But Da Gama did not steer forthright to
the Indies, nor Jason to the Colchian strand, though each knew clearly
the goal he sought, just as Wentworth and Selden, Falkland and
Montrose, Eliot and Milton, knew the State they were steering for,
though each may have wavered in his own mind as to the course, and at
last parted fatally from his companions. Practical does not always
mean commonplace, and in the light of their deeds it seems superfluous
to discuss whether the writer of _Defensio pro Populo Anglicano_, the
destroyer of the Campbells, or the accuser of Buckingham, were
practical politicians. In their lives, in the shaping of their
careers, the visionary is actualized, the ideal real, in that fidelity
of soul which leaves one dead on the battlefield, another on the
gibbet, thirty feet high, "honoured thus in death," as he remarked
pleasantly, a third to the dreary martyrdom of the Tower, a fourth to
that dread visitation, endured with stoic grandeur, and yet at times
forcing from his lips the cry of anguish which thrills the verse of
_Samson Agonistes_--

O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse,
Without all hope of day.

But not in vain. The tireless centuries have accomplished the task
these men initiated, have travelled the path they set forth in, have
completed the journey which they began.

We find the same pre-occupation with some wider conception of justice,
empire, and freedom in the younger Barclay, the author of _Argenis_,
written in Latin but read in many languages, studied by Richelieu and
moulding his later, wiser policy towards the Huguenots, read, above
all, by Fenelon, who rises from it to write _Telemaque_. It meets us
in the last work of Algernon Sidney, which, like Eliot's treatise,
bears about it the air of a martyr's cell. We find it again explicitly
in the _Oceana_ of Harrington, in the fragmentary writings of
Shaftesbury, and in actual politics it finds triumphant expression at
last in the eloquence that was like a battle-cry, in the energy that at
moments seems superhuman, the wisdom, the penetrating foresight, of the
mightiest of all England