stocracies to be
pledged to each other by oath, and sworn also to the two great
principles of Liberty of Conscience and resistance to any attempt at
Single Person sovereignty. What communication between the Central
Government so constituted and the body of the People might be
necessary for the free play of opinion might be sufficiently kept
up, he hints, by the machinery of County Committees. The entire
scheme may seem strange to those whose theory of a Republic refuses
the very imagination of an aristocracy or of perpetuity of power in
the same hands; but both, notions, and especially that of perpetuity
of power in the same hands, had been growing on Milton, and were not
inconsistent with _his_ theory of a Republic. Nor was his
present scheme, with all its strangeness, the least practical of the
many "models" that theorists were putting forth. It would, doubtless,
have failed in the trial,--for the conception of a perpetual Civil
Council at Whitehall always in harmony with a perpetual Military
Council in Wallingford House presupposed moral conditions in both
bodies less likely to be forthcoming in themselves than in Milton's
thoughts about them. But everything else would have failed equally,
and some of the "models" perhaps more speedily. Since the subversion
of Richard's Protectorate by Fleetwood and Desborough there had been
no possible stop-gap against the return of the Stuarts.

The consulting authorities at Whitehall and Wallingford House did
adopt a course having some semblance of that suggested by Milton.
Before the 25th of October, or within six days after the date of
Milton's letter, the relics of the Council of State of the Rump
agreed to be transformed, with additions nominated by the Officers,
into the new Supreme Executive called _The Committee of Safety_;
and, as _The Wallingford-House Council of Officers_ still
continued to sit in the close vicinity of this new Council at
Whitehall, the Government was then vested, in fact, in the two
aristocracies, with Fleetwood, Lambert, Desborough, Berry, and
others, as members of both, and connecting links between them. But
the new _Committee of Safety_ was not such a Senate or Council
as Milton had imagined. For one thing, it consisted but of
twenty-three persons (see the list ante p. 494), whereas Milton would
have probably liked to see a Council of twice that size or even
larger. For another, it was not composed of persons perfectly sound
on Milton's two propose