t first
freed us from tyranny and have continued ever since through all
changes constant to their trust"; but he lets it stand now, as not
inapplicable to the new condition of things brought in by the sudden
mixture of the Secluded with the Rumpers. The "_Ready and Easy
Way_," however, has still to be explained; and to that he
proceeds.

The central idea of the pamphlet, and practically its backbone, is
_One and the same Parliament in Perpetuity or Membership for
Life_. This may be a surprise, not only to those who, knowing that
Milton was a Republican, conceive him therefore to have held
necessarily the exact modern theory of Representative Government, but
also to those who understand Milton better, and who may remember at
this point his somewhat contemptuous estimates on previous occasions
of the value of the bodies called Parliaments. If those previous
passages of his writings are studied, however, it will be found that
he is not now so inconsistent as he looks. He had always thought a
broad general council of fit men in the centre of a nation the
essential of good government; and his chief recommendation to
Cromwell, even when approving of his exceptional Sovereignty, had
been that he should keep round him such a general Council. Further,
it will be found that _permanence of the same men at the centre of
affairs_ had always been his implied ideal, whether permanence of
an exceptional Single-Person sovereignty surrounded by a Council, or
permanence of a Council without a Single-Person sovereignty. His real
objection to so-called Parliaments, it will be found, lay in the
association with them of the ideas of shiftingness, interruptedness,
successiveness, the turmoil and debauchery of successive general
elections. So possessed was he with the notion of permanence of
tenure as desirable in the governing agency, whatever it might be,
that he had even modified the notion, as we have seen, to suit the
anomalous conditions of that stage of the Anarchy which we have
called the Wallingford-House Interruption, He had recommended then
the experiment of a duality of life-aristocracies, one civil and the
other military. And now, the turn of circumstances and of his
speculations shutting him up once more to a single Civil Parliament
of the ordinary size and kind, he will insist on the quality of
permanence or perpetuity as that which alone will make _it_
answer the purpose. But, the very name "Parliament" having been
vitiated s