viving rag of a Parliament of 500, the members of which had been
elected at various times, and irregularly, between 1640 and 1649.
Nay, it was not even the surviving rag of that Parliament itself, but
the rag of a stump to which that Parliament had been already reduced
in 1649 by prior military hacking and carving. What pinch of
representative virtue, for the England, Scotland, and Ireland of May
1659, or even for the non-Royalist portions of their populations, was
there in the Restored Rump? Many of them had not been in contact with
their original constituencies for ten years or more; those who had
gone back to their original constituencies, or to others, for
election to the Protectorate Parliaments, or to any of them, had by
that fact treated the rights of the Long Parliament, in its integrity
or in its last stump, as lapsed and defunct, and had appealed to the
community afresh. When that appeal had gone against them, when the
last and fullest Parliament had represented it as the will of the
people that the Protectoral system should be continued, was it not
odd that about forty of the defeated minority of that Parliament,
without consulting their constituencies, should associate themselves
with a number of others, then quite astray from any constituencies,
and with no other title than that of being Old Rumpers too, and this
for the purpose of instituting the very form of Government just
ascertained to be unpopular? It was odd _theoretically_; for,
though there were then Republicans--Milton for one--who had adopted
the principle (essentially Cromwell's too) that the government of
States cannot and ought not to go by mere multitudinous suffrage, but
may be dictated and compelled by the proper few, the Rumpers did not
profess to be Republicans of this sort. The supremacy of the People
through a Single Representative House was the deepest theoretical
tenet of most of the men who had now met to oppose the will of the
People as declared in the fullest Representative House within memory.
But, though odd theoretically, the contradiction is of a kind common
enough in History. The ultra-Republicans of the Restored Rump, whose
very definition of the right Republican system was that there ought
to be nothing in it _a priori_ whatever, were yet believers in
the indefeasible and _a priori_ authority of that Republican
system itself. In other words, so important was it that there should
be no government except by the people themselve