to
warrant the usurpation--the utter impossibility of governing England,
except by exercising the rights and privileges of an absolute monarch.
On the principles of expediency, he has been vindicated, and will be
vindicated, so long as his cause is advocated by partisan historians,
or expediency itself is advocated as a rule of life.

[Sidenote: Policy of Cromwell.]

After the battle of Worcester, Cromwell lost, in a measure, his
democratic sympathies, and naturally, in view of the great excesses of
the party with which he had been identified. That he desired the
public good we cannot reasonably doubt; and he adapted himself to
those circumstances which seemed to advance it, and which a spirit of
wild democratic license assuredly did not. So far as it contributed to
overturn the throne of the Stuarts, and the whole system of public
abuses, civil and ecclesiastical, Cromwell favored it. But no further.
When it seemed subversive of law and order, the grand ends of all
civil governments, then he opposed it. And in this he showed that he
was much more conservative in his spirit than has often been supposed;
and, in this conservatism he resembled Luther and other great
reformers, who were not unreflecting incendiaries, as is sometimes
thought--men who destroy, but do not reconstruct. Luther, at heart,
was a conservative, and never sought a change to which he was not led
by strong inward tempests--forced to make it by the voice of his
conscience, which he ever obeyed, and loyalty to which so remarkably
characterized the early reformers, and no class of men more than the
Puritans. Cromwell abhorred the government of Charles, because it was
not a government which respected justice, and which set at defiance
the higher laws of God. It was not because Charles violated the
constitution, it was because he violated truth and equity, and the
nation's good, that he opposed him. Cromwell usurped his prerogatives,
and violated the English constitution; but he did not transgress those
great primal principles of truth, for which constitutions are made. He
looked beyond constitutions to abstract laws of justice; and it never
can be laid to his charge that he slighted these, or proved a weak or
wicked ruler. He quarrelled with parliament, because the parliament
wished to perpetuate its existence unlawfully and meanly, and was
moreover unwilling and unable to cope with many difficulties which
constantly arose. It may be supposed that Cromw