the law of the stronger whosoever would not let
your Cause prosper: there are but fifty or threescore of you left there,
debating in these days. Tell us what we shall do; not in the way of
Formula, but of practicable Fact!

How they did finally answer, remains obscure to this day. The diligent
Godwin himself admits that he cannot make it out. The likeliest is, that
this poor Parliament still would not, and indeed could not dissolve and
disperse; that when it came to the point of actually dispersing, they
again, for the tenth or twentieth time, adjourned it,--and Cromwell's
patience failed him. But we will take the favorablest hypothesis ever
started for the Parliament; the favorablest, though I believe it is not
the true one, but too favorable.

According to this version: At the uttermost crisis, when Cromwell and
his Officers were met on the one hand, and the fifty or sixty Rump
Members on the other, it was suddenly told Cromwell that the Rump in its
despair _was_ answering in a very singular way; that in their splenetic
envious despair, to keep out the Army at least, these men were hurrying
through the House a kind of Reform Bill,--Parliament to be chosen by
the whole of England; equable electoral division into districts; free
suffrage, and the rest of it! A very questionable, or indeed for _them_
an unquestionable thing. Reform Bill, free suffrage of Englishmen? Why,
the Royalists themselves, silenced indeed but not exterminated, perhaps
_outnumber_ us; the great numerical majority of England was always
indifferent to our Cause, merely looked at it and submitted to it. It is
in weight and force, not by counting of heads, that we are the majority!
And now with your Formulas and Reform Bills, the whole matter, sorely
won by our swords, shall again launch itself to sea; become a mere
hope, and likelihood, _small_ even as a likelihood? And it is not a
likelihood; it is a certainty, which we have won, by God's strength and
our own right hands, and do now hold _here_. Cromwell walked down to
these refractory Members; interrupted them in that rapid speed of their
Reform Bill;--ordered them to begone, and talk there no more.--Can we
not forgive him? Can we not understand him? John Milton, who looked
on it all near at hand, could applaud him. The Reality had swept the
Formulas away before it. I fancy, most men who were realities in England
might see into the necessity of that.

The strong daring man, therefore, has set all