Theodore Roosevelt

“ THE SECOND CIVIL WAR AND THE DEATH OF THE KING When the stout old Royalist, Sir Jacob Astley, was overcome and surrendered, he exclaimed, as he gave up his sword: “Now you have done your work and may go play, unless you fall out among yourselves!” It very soon became evident that the victors would fall out among themselves. Any revolutionary movement must be carried through by parties whose aims are so different, or whose feelings and interests are so divergent, that there is great difficulty in the victors coming to a working agreement to conserve the fruits of their victory. ”

“ Generations had to pass before men could grasp the true principles of religious toleration and political equality in all their bearings; and, like every other man who actually works out great reforms, who actually does signal service in the world, Cromwell had to face facts as they were, and not as bodies of extremists—no matter how good—thought they ought to be.
The best and most high-minded of the Puritan party were now growing to fear lest the Presbyterians should try to perpetuate the old religious oppression under a new name. ”

“ At the time when the great bulk even of civilized mankind believed in the right of a king, not merely to rule, but to oppress, the action of the Puritans struck horror throughout Europe. Even Republican Holland was stirred to condemnation, and as the King was the symbol of the State, and as custom dies hard, generations passed during which the great majority of good and loyal, but not particularly far-sighted or deep-thinking men, spoke with intense sympathy of Charles, and with the most sincere horror of the regicides, especially Cromwell. ”

“ Though Philip’s bigotry made him the persecutor of heretics, it taught him no mercy toward those of his own faith but of a different nationality, whether Irish or Portuguese. When England became Protestant, Ireland stood steadfastly for the old faith; and religious was added to race hatred. In Spain the Holy Inquisition was the handmaid of grinding tyranny. In Ireland the Catholic priesthood was the sole friend, standby, and comforter of a hunted and despairing people. In the Netherlands and on the high seas Protestantism was the creed of liberty. ”

“ Cromwell could, in all probability, have been such a leader at the end as he was during his early years of public life; and when he permitted himself to fall from the position of a leader among free men, to that of a master over men for whose welfare he sincerely strove, but in whose freedom he did not believe, he marred the great work he had done. ”

“ Nevertheless, not only the greatest statesmen, but all men who are truly wise and patriotic, recognize that peace is good only when it comes honorably and is used for honorable purposes, and that the peace of mere sloth or incapacity is as great a curse as the most unrighteous war. Those who doubt this would do well to study the condition of England during the reign of James I., and during the first part of the reign of Charles I. England had then no standing army and no foreign policy worthy of the name. ”

“ With Oliver’s death his memory passed under a cloud, through which his greatness was to be but dimly seen until generations of men had lived and died. He left many descendants, and there are now in England, and also in America, and possibly Australia, very many men and women, in all ranks of life, who have his blood in their veins—though in the direct line his name has died out. ”

“ In criticising Cromwell, however, we must remember that generally in such cases an even greater share of blame must attach to the nation than to the man. Free government is only for nations that deserve it; and they lose all right to it by licentiousness, no less than by servility. If a nation cannot govern itself, it makes comparatively little difference whether its inability springs from a slavish and craven distrust of its own powers, or from sheer incapacity on the part of its citizens to exercise self-control and to act together. ”

“ At the close of the first Civil War there is no reason to suppose that he had any ambition inconsistent with the highest good of his country, or any thought of making himself paramount. To all outward seeming, his efforts were conscientiously directed to securing the fruits of the victory for liberty, while at the same time securing stability in the government. Unfortunately, in coming to an agreement among men, no moderation or wisdom on the part of any one man will suffice. ”

“ If Parliament could control not only the raising, but the expenditure of money, it would be the supreme source of power, and the King but a figure-head; in other words, the government would be put upon the basis on which it has actually stood during the present century. For many reigns the Commons had been accustomed to vote to each king for life, at the outset of his reign, the duties on exports and imports, known as tonnage and poundage; but during the years immediately past men had been forced to think much on liberty and self-government. ”

“ Even now there is a tendency in the law toward the deification of technicalities, the substitution of the letter for the spirit; a tendency which can only be offset by a Bench, and, indeed, a Bar, possessing both courage and common-sense. At that time, the condition of affairs was much worse, and the best men in England shared the popular feeling of extreme dislike for lawyers, as men whose trade was not to secure justice, but to weave a great web of technicalities which completely defeated justice. ”

“ Rebellion, revolution—the appeal to arms to redress grievances; these are measures that can only be justified in extreme cases. It is far better to suffer any moderate evil, or even a very serious evil, so long as there is a chance of its peaceable redress, than to plunge the country into civil war; and the men who head or instigate armed rebellions for which there is not the most ample justification must be held as one degree worse than any but the most evil tyrants. Between the Scylla of despotism and the Charybdis of anarchy there is but little to choose ”

“ In his higher and better moments, and far more than most men of his generation, Cromwell tried to live up to them. When Mazarin, the great French cardinal, in responding to Cromwell’s call for toleration of the Vaudois, asked toleration for English Catholics, Cromwell answered, truly, that he had done all he could in face of the hostile spirit of the people, and more than had before been done in England. ”

“ When the Stuarts took possession of the throne of England they found a people which, unlike the peoples of most of the neighboring States, had not fought out its religious convictions. The Reformation had deeply stirred men’s souls. Religion had become a matter of vital and terrible importance to Protestant and to Catholic. Among the extremists, the men who had given the tone to the Reformation in Germany, Switzerland, Holland, and Scotland, religion, as they understood it, entered into every act of their lives. ”

“ A people thoroughly unfit for self-government, as were the French at the end of the eighteenth century, are the natural prey of a conscienceless tyrant like Napoleon. A people like the Americans of the same generation can be led along the path of liberty and order by a Washington. The English people, in the middle of the seventeenth century, might have been helped to entire self-government by Cromwell, but were not sufficiently advanced politically to keep him from making himself their absolute master if he proved morally unequal to rising to the Washington level ”

“ William, both by position and by temper, was far better fitted than great Oliver to submit to interference with his plans, to get on with representative bodies of freemen, and to make the best he could out of each situation as it arose, instead of indignantly setting his own will above law and above the will of the majority, because for the moment the result might be better for himself and the nation. Speaker Reed once said, that “in the long run, the average sense of the many is better for the many than the best sense of any one man;” ”

“ It was the revolt of a race which rose to avenge wrongs as bitter as ever one people inflicted upon another; and it was inevitable that it should be accompanied by appalling outrages in certain places. It was on these outrages that the English fixed their eyes, naturally ignoring the generations of English evil-doing which had brought them about. A furious cry for revenge arose. Every Puritan, from Oliver Cromwell down, regarded the massacres as a fresh proof that Roman Catholics ought to be treated, not as professors of another Christian creed, but as cruel public enemies ”

“ Cromwell was a born fighter, always anxious for the trial of the sword; a man who habitually took castles and walled towns by storm, himself at need heading the stormers, and who won his pitched battles by the shock of his terrible cavalry, which he often led in person, and which invariably ruined any foe whom he had overthrown. He now advanced with too much confidence and found himself in a very ugly situation; his men sickening rapidly, while Leslie’s army increased in numbers and discipline. ”

“ Mere militia who will not submit to rigid discipline cannot be made the equals of regulars by no matter how many years of desultory fighting. In the War of the American Revolution it was the Continentals—the regulars of Washington, Wayne, and Greene—who finally won the victory, while even to the very end of the struggle the ordinary militia proved utterly unable to face the red-coats. So in the English Civil War, it was the carefully drilled and trained horse and foot of the Eastern Association, and not the disorderly London trained-bands, who overthrew the King’s men. ”

“ They were Presbyterians, who believed in the Parliament, but who also believed in the throne. They hated the Independents quite as much as they hated the Episcopalians, and felt a growing distrust of Cromwell, who in religious matters was the leader of the Independents, and who had announced that if he met the King in battle he would kill him as quickly as he would kill anyone else. Essex was no more capable of putting a finish to the war than McClellan was capable of overthrowing the Confederacy. The one, like the other, had to make room for sterner and more resolute men. ”

“ No provision was at first made by which any man should lawfully be recognized as chief in the new Commonwealth; but, as a matter of fact, there was one man, and one man only, who had to be acknowledged, however unwillingly, as master and leader. There were many upright and able civil servants; many high-minded and fervent reformers; many grim and good captains: but waist-high above them all rose the mighty and strenuous figure of Oliver Cromwell. ”

“ During Cromwell’s youth and early manhood Spain was still the most powerful and most dreaded of European nations. Her government had become a mere tyranny; her religion fanatical bigotry of a type more extreme than any that existed elsewhere, even in an age when all creeds tended toward fanaticism and bigotry. It was in Spain that the Holy Inquisition chiefly flourished—one of the most fearful engines for the destruction of all that was highest in mankind that the world has ever seen. Catholics were oppressed in England and Protestants in France ”

“ Even nowadays, the effort for practical reform in American city government is rendered immeasurably more difficult by the fact that a considerable number of the best citizens are prone to devote their utmost energies, not to striving for the fundamentals of social morality, civic honesty, and good government, but, in accordance with their own theory of propriety of conduct, to preventing other men from pursuing what these latter regard as innocent pleasures ”

“ But if in her relations to one Catholic nation England appeared as the champion of religious liberty, of all that makes life worth having to the free men who live in free nations, yet in her relations to another Catholic people she herself played the rôle of merciless oppressor—religious, political, and social. ”

“ Of course, in practice, the answer is that there are hundreds of different creeds, or shades of creeds, all of which are believed in with equal devoutness by their followers, and therefore in a workaday government it is necessary to insist that none shall interfere with any other. Where people are as far advanced in practical good sense and in true religious toleration as in the United States to-day, the great majority of each creed gradually grows to accept this position as axiomatic, and the smaller minority is kept in check without effort, both by law and by public opinion. ”

“ The Levellers, as they were called, were looked upon in that day, even by advocates of freedom like Cromwell, with great distrust, although the principles they advocated—such as manhood suffrage—are now the commonplaces of American politics. Of course, then they were not commonplaces; they were revolutionary ideas, for the reception of which the mind of the English people was not ready, and therefore it was the duty of men who sought practical reform to refuse to put these schemes into operation.
There were much more extreme and dangerous groups than the mere Republicans ”

“ It may be the highest duty to oppose a war before it is brought on, but once the country is at war, the man who fails to support it with all possible heartiness comes perilously near being a traitor, and his conduct can only be justified on grounds which in time of peace would justify a revolution. The whole strength of the English Commonwealth was in the Independents. Royalists, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, extreme Levellers, were all against it. ”

“ PERSONAL RULE When Cromwell, in January, 1655, dismissed the first Protectorate Parliament, he left himself nothing to do but to establish his own personal rule; in other words, he became a tyrant. Of course the word cannot be used in the sense we use it in describing Ivan the Terrible, or Agathokles. As each country must, sooner or later, obtain exactly that measure of political freedom to which it is entitled, so, when it falls under a tyranny, the tyranny must be strictly conditioned by the character of the people. ”

“ Had the Irish remained a Celtic nation, separate in speech and government from Great Britain, they could have had no share in the expansion of the English race, or at least could have played only a very subordinate part. As it is, in the great English-speaking commonwealths that have grown up in North America and Australasia, the descendants of the Irish now stand on an exact equality with those of the Scotch and English, and furnish their full proportion of leadership in the government of the communities ”

“ The resolute determination to fight for one’s own liberty of conscience, when it once becomes the characteristic of the majority, cannot but tend toward securing liberty of conscience for all; whereas, for one man, who claims supremacy in the Church as well as overlordship in the State, to seek to impose his will upon others in matters both spiritual and political, cannot but produce a very aggravated form of tyranny. The Stuarts represented an extreme, reactionary type of kingship; a type absolutely alien to all that was highest and most characteristic in the English character. ”