ly as the House of
Nassau, of whom to stand in perpetual doubt and suspicion, but we
shall live the clearest and absolutest free nation, in the world."

[Footnote 1: The allusion here is vague.]

In effect, therefore, Milton's _Ready and Easy Way_, recommended
to the mixed Parliament of Residuary Rumpers and their reseated
Presbyterian half-brothers of March 1659-60, is that this Parliament,
nailing the Republican flag to the mast, should make itself, or some
enlargement of itself, the perpetual supreme power under the name of
THE GRAND COUNCIL OF THE COMMONWEALTH, appointing a smaller
_Council of State_, as heretofore, to be the working executive,
but plainly intimating to the people that there are to be no more
general Parliamentary elections, but only elections to vacancies as
they may occur in the Grand Council by death or misdemeanour. He is
himself against the adoption of Harrington's principle of rotation to
any extent whatever; but, if it would reconcile people to his scheme,
he would concede rotation so far as to let a portion of the Grand
Council go out every second or third year to admit new men.

While expounding his main idea, Milton had intimated that he had
another suggestion in reserve, which might help to reconcile
reasonable men of democratic prepossessions to the seeming novelty of
an irremovable apparatus of Government at the centre. This suggestion
he brings forward near the end of the pamphlet. He arrives at it in
the course of a demonstration in farther detail of certain
superiorities of Commonwealth government over Regal. "The whole
freedom of man," he says, "consists either in Spiritual or Civil
Liberty." Glancing first at Spiritual Liberty, he contents himself
with a general statement of the principle of Liberty of Conscience,
as implying the absolute and unimpeded right of every individual
Christian to interpret the Scripture for himself and give utterance
and effect to his conclusions; and, though he does not conceal that
in his own opinion such Liberty of Conscience cannot be complete
without Church-disestablishment, he does not press that for the
present. Enough that Liberty of Conscience, according to any
endurable definition of it, is more safe in a Republic than in a
Kingdom,--which, by various instances from history, he maintains to
be a fact. Then, coming to Civil Liberty, he propounds his reserved
suggestion, or the second real novelty of his pamphlet, thus:--

"The other p