defending liberty. They were even defending some remains
of mediaeval liberty, though not the best; the jury though not the guild.
Even feudalism had involved a localism not without liberal elements,
which lingered in the aristocratic system. Those who loved such things
might well be alarmed at the Leviathan of the State, which for Hobbes
was a single monster and for France a single man.

As to the mere facts, it must be said again that in so far as Puritanism
was pure, it was unfortunately passing. And the very type of the
transition by which it passed can be found in that extraordinary man who
is popularly credited with making it predominate. Oliver Cromwell is in
history much less the leader of Puritanism than the tamer of Puritanism.
He was undoubtedly possessed, certainly in his youth, possibly all his
life, by the rather sombre religious passions of his period; but as he
emerges into importance, he stands more and more for the Positivism of
the English as compared with the Puritanism of the Scotch. He is one of
the Puritan squires; but he is steadily more of the squire and less of
the Puritan; and he points to the process by which the squirearchy
became at last merely pagan. This is the key to most of what is praised
and most of what is blamed in him; the key to the comparative sanity,
toleration and modern efficiency of many of his departures; the key to
the comparative coarseness, earthiness, cynicism, and lack of sympathy
in many others. He was the reverse of an idealist; and he cannot without
absurdity be held up as an ideal; but he was, like most of the squires,
a type genuinely English; not without public spirit, certainly not
without patriotism. His seizure of personal power, which destroyed an
impersonal and ideal government, had something English in its very
unreason. The act of killing the King, I fancy, was not primarily his,
and certainly not characteristically his. It was a concession to the
high inhuman ideals of the tiny group of true Puritans, with whom he had
to compromise but with whom he afterwards collided. It was logic rather
than cruelty in the act that was not Cromwellian; for he treated with
bestial cruelty the native Irish, whom the new spiritual exclusiveness
regarded as beasts--or as the modern euphemism would put it, as
aborigines. But his practical temper was more akin to such human
slaughter on what seemed to him the edges of civilization, than to a
sort of human sacrifice in the very