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consciences found him guilty, would remit the his own Declaration, in which he had acknowpenalty of blood, some from policy, some from ledged our rights, and had been paid handsomely mercy. I have conversed with Hutchinson, with for the acknowledgment. I sorely fear the Ludlow, your friend and mine, with Henry month of January is marked in the Calendar by Nevile, and Walter Long: you will oblige these the finger of the Almighty, for the heavy chastiseworthy friends, and unite in your favour the ment of this misdeed. We must take heed unto suffrages of the truest and trustiest men living. our ways, and never again be led into the wicked There are many others, with whom I am in no temptation of trusting the false and reprobate. habits of intercourse, who are known to entertain Equity might demand from the traitor more the same sentiments; and these also are among than his worthless and pernicious life. Equity the country gentlemen, to whom our parliament might retaliate on him what Eliot and other owes the better part of its reputation. most innocent and most virtuous men have suffered; pestilential imprisonment, lingering, painful, incurable disease, fetters and thumbscrews, racks and mutilations. Should the guiltless have suffered these things rather than the guilty? the defender of his home and property rather than the robber who broke into them? If the extinction of a spark prevents worse things than the conflagration of twenty cities, if it prevents the expansion of principles endemically noxious through incalculable ages, such as slavish endurance and all unmanly propensities, I would never take by the collar him who resolutely setteth his foot thereon. Whether a grain of dust be blown away in the morning, in the noon, or in the evening, what matter? But it imports very seriously whether it be blown in the eyes and darken the sight of a nation. This is the difference between him who dies in the solitude of his chamber, and him whom halberts, by God's ordinance, may surround upon the scaffold.

Cromwell. You country gentlemen bring with you into the People's House a freshness and sweet savour, which our citizens lack mightily. I would fain merit your esteem, heedless of those pursy fellows from hulks and warehouses, with one ear lappeted by the pen behind it, and the other an heir-loom, as Charles would have had it, in Laud's star-chamber. Oh! they are proud and bloody men. My heart melts; but, alas! my authority is null: I am the servant of the Commonwealth: I will not, dare not, betray it. If Charles Stuart had threatened my death only, in the letter we ripped out of the saddle, I would have reproved him manfully and turned him adrift: but others are concerned, lives more precious than mine, worn as it is with fastings, prayers, long services, and preyed upon by a pouncing disease. The Lord hath led him into the toils laid for the innocent. Foolish man! he never could eschew evil counsel. Noble. In comparison with you, he is but as a pinnacle to a buttress. I acknowledge his weaknesses, and cannot wink upon his crimes: but that which you visit as the heaviest of them, perhaps was not so, although the most disastrous to both parties; the bearing of arms against his people. He fought for what he considered his hereditary property: we do the same: should we be hanged for losing a lawsuit?

Cromwell. No, unless it is the second. Thou talkest finely and foolishly, Wat, for a man of thy calm discernment. If a rogue holds a pistol to my breast, do I ask him who he is? do I care whether his doublet be of catskin or of dogskin? Fie upon such wicked sophisms! Marvellous, how the devil works upon good men's minds. Friend! friend! hast thou lost thy recollection? On the third of June, 1628, an usher stood at the door of our Commons-house, to hinder any member from leaving it, under pain of being sent to the Tower. On the fifth of the same month, the Speaker said he had received the King's order to interrupt any who should utter a word against his ministers. In the following year we might have justly hanged him for the crime of forgery, seeing that on the twenty-first of January he commanded his printer, Norton, to falsify the text of * Ludlow, a most humane and temperate man, signed the death-warrant of Charles, for violating the constitution he had sworn to defend, for depriving the subject of property, liberty, limbs, and life, unlawfully. In equity he could do no otherwise; and to equity was the only appeal, since the laws of the land had been erased by the king himself.

Noble. From so cruel an infliction let me hope our unfortunate king may be exempted. He was always more to be dreaded by his friends than by his enemies, and now by neither.

Cromwell. God forbid that Englishman should be feared by Englishman! but to be daunted by the weakest, to bend before the worst . . . I tell thee, Walter Noble, if Moses and the prophets commanded me to this villany, I would draw back and mount my horse.

Noble. I wish that our history, already too dark with blood, should contain, as far as we are concerned in it, some unpolluted pages.

Cromwell. "Twere better, much better. Never shall I be called, I promise thee, an unnecessary shedder of blood. Remember, my good prudent friend, of what materials our sectaries are composed: what hostility against all eminence, what rancour against all glory. Not only kingly power offends them, but every other; and they talk of putting to the sword, as if it were the quietest, gentlest, and most ordinary thing in the world. The knaves even dictate from their stools and benches to men in armour, bruised and bleeding for them; and with schooldames' scourges in their fists do they give counsel to those who protect them from the cart and halter. In the name of the Lord, I must spit outright (or worse) upon these crackling bouncing firebrands, before I can make them tractable.

Noble. I lament their blindness; but follies wear out the faster by being hard run upon. This

fermenting sourness will presently turn vapid, and people will cast it out. I am not surprised that you are discontented and angry at what thwarts your better nature. But come, Cromwell, overlook them, despise them, and erect to yourself a glorious name by sparing a mortal enemy. Cromwell. A glorious name, by God's blessing, I will erect, and all our fellow-labourers shall rejoice at it but I see better than they do the blow descending on them, and my arm better than theirs can ward it off. Noble, thy heart overflows with kindness for Charles Stuart: if he were at liberty to-morrow by thy intercession, he would sign thy death-warrant the day after, for serving the Commonwealth. A generation of vipers! there is nothing upright or grateful in them never was there a drop of even Scotch blood in their veins. Indeed we have a clue to their bedchamber still hanging on the door, and I suspect that an Italian fiddler or French valet has more than once crossed the current.

Noble. That may be: nor indeed is it credible that any royal or courtly family has gone on for three generations without a spur from interloper. Look at France! some stout Parisian saint performed the last miracle there.*

Cromwell. Now thou talkest gravely and sensibly: I could hear thee discourse thus for hours together. Noble. Hear me, Cromwell, with equal patience on matters more important. We all have our sufferings; why increase one another's wantonly? Be the blood Scotch or English, French or Italian, a drummer's or a buffoon's, it carries a soul upon its stream, and every soul has many places to touch at, and much business to perform, before it reaches its ultimate destination. Abolish the power of Charles; extinguish not his virtues. Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy to be preserved. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done, or is likely to do, more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects to ours, and their business is never with virtues or with hopes. Justice upon earth has forgotten half her lesson, and repeats the other half badly. God commanded her to reward and to punish. She would tell you that punishment is the reward of the wicked, and that the rewards of the good belong to him, whose delight is their distribution in another place. She is neither blind, as some have represented her, nor clear-sighted: she is oneeyed, and looks fixedly and fondly with her one eye upon edge-tools and halters. The best actions are never recompensed, and the worst are seldom chastised. The virtuous man passes by without a good morrow from us, and the malefactor may walk at large where he will, provided he walk far enough from encroachment on our passions and their playthings. Let us, Cromwell, in God's

* The birth of Louis XIV. is somewhat like a miracle to

true believers, while among sceptics the principal doubt is not whether the child was supposititious, but whether he

was so after his birth or before.

name, turn the laws to their right intention: let us render it the interest of all to love them and keep them holy. They are at present, both in form and essence, the greatest curse that society labours under; the scorn of the wicked, the consternation of the good, the refuge of those who violate, and the ruin of those who appeal to them.

Cromwell. You have paid, I see, chancery fees, Walter.

Noble. I should then have paid not only what is exorbitant, but what is altogether undue. Paying a lawyer, in any court, we pay over again what we have paid before. If government has neglected to provide that our duties be taught us, and our lives, properties, and station in society, be secured, what right has it to one farthing from us? for what else have our forefathers and ourselves been taxed? for what else are magistrates of any kind appointed? There is an awfulness in symmetry which chastens even the wildest, and there is a terror in distortion at which they strike and fly. It is thus in regard to law. We should be slow in the censure of princes, and slower in the chastisement. Kingship is a profession which has produced few among the most illustrious, many among the most despicable, of the human race. As in our days they are educated and treated, he is deserving of no slight commendation who rises in moral worth to the level of his lowest subject; so manifold and so great are the impediments.

Reverting to the peculiar case of Charles, in my opinion you are ill justified by morality or policy in punishing him capitally. The representatives of the people ought to superintend the education of their princes; where they have omitted it, the mischief and the responsibility rest with them. As kings are the administrators of the commonwealth, they must submit their whole household to the national inspection: on which principle, the preceptors of their children should be appointed by parliament; and the pupils, until they have attained their majority, should be examined twice annually on the extent and on the direction of their studies, in the presence of seven men at least, chosen out of the Commonshouse by ballot. Nothing of the kind having been done, and the principles of this unfortunate king having been distorted by a wrong education, and retained in their obliquity by evil counsellors, I would now, on the reclamation both of generosity and of justice, try clemency. If it fails, his adherents will be confounded at his perfidy, and, expecting a like return for their services, will abandon him.

Cromwell. Whatever his education was, thinkest thou he was not wise enough to know his wickedness, his usurpation and tyranny, when he resolved to rule without a parliament? to levy taxes, to force consciences, to imprison, to slay, at his own arbitrement and pleasure? Some time before the most violent of his outrages, had he not received a grant of money from us on conditions which he

Noble. Should we be less merciful to our fellowcreatures than to our domestic animals? Before we deliver them to be killed, we weigh their services against their inconveniences. On the foundation of policy, when we have no better, let us erect the trophies of humanity: let us consider that, educated in the same manner and situated in the same position, we ourselves might have acted as reprovably. Abolish that for ever which must else for ever generate abuses; and attribute the faults of the man to the office, not the faults of the office to the man.

violated? He then seized forcibly what belonged Cromwell. Justice is perfect; an attribute of to the public and, because we remonstrated God; we must not trifle with it. against this fraud and theft, did he not prosecute us as rebels? Whereas, when a king acts against the laws or without them, there can be but one rebel in the kingdom. Accomplices there may be; and such we may treat with mildness, if they do not wring and wrest it away from us and turn it against us, pushing down those who raised them. When the leading stag of such a herd is intractably wild, and obstinately vicious to his keepers, he ought to be hamstrung and thrown across the paling, wherever he is overtaken. What! pat his hide forsooth! hug his neck, garland his horns, pipe to him, try gentleness, try clemency! Walter, Walter! we laugh at speculators.

Noble. Many indeed are ready enough to laugh at speculators, because many profit, or expect to profit, by established and widening abuses. Speculations toward evil lose their name by adoption: speculations toward good are for ever speculations, and he who hath proposed them is a chimerical and silly creature. Among the matters under this denomination I never find a cruel project, I never find an oppressive or unjust one: how happens it?

Cromwell. Proportions should exist in all things. Sovrans are paid higher than others for their office; they should therefore be punished more severely for abusing it, even if the consequences of this abuse were in nothing more grievous or extensive. We cannot clap them in the stocks conveniently, nor whip them at the market-place. Where there is a crown there must be an axe: I would keep it there only.

Noble. Lop off the rotten, press out the poisonous, preserve the rest: let it suffice to have given this memorable example of national power and justice.

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Cromwell. I have no bowels for hypocrisy, and I abominate and detest kingship.

Noble. I abominate and detest hangmanship; but in certain stages of society both are necessary. Let them go together; we want neither now.

Cromwell. Men, like nails, lose their usefulness when they lose their direction and begin to bend : such nails are then thrown into the dust or into the furnace. I must do my duty; I must accomplish what is commanded me; I must not be turned aside. I am loth to be cast into the furnace or the dust: but God's will be done! Prythee, Wat, since thou readest, as I see, the books of philosophers, didst thou ever hear of Digby's remedies by sympathy?

Noble. Yes, formerly.

Cromwell. Well, now, I protest, I do believe there is something in them. To cure my headache, I must breathe a vein in the neck of Charles.

Noble. Oliver, Oliver, others are wittiest over wine, thou over blood; cold-hearted, cruel man.*

Cromwell. Why, dost thou verily think me so, Walter? Perhaps thou art right in the main : but he alone who fashioned me in my mother's womb, and who sees things deeper than we do, knows that.

ESCHINES AND PHOCION.

Eschines. O Phocion, again I kiss the hand that hath ever raised up the unfortunate. Phocion. I know not, Eschines, to what your discourse would tend.

Eschines. Yesterday, when the malice of Demosthenes would have turned against me the vengeance of the people; by pointing me out as him whom the priestess of Apollo had designated, in declaring the Athenians were unanimous, one excepted; did you not cry aloud, I am the man; I approve of nothing you do? That I see you again, that I can express to you my gratitude, these are your gifts.

Phocion. And does Æschines then suppose that I should not have performed my duty, whether he were alive or dead? To have removed from the envy of an ungenerous rival, and from the resentment of an inconsiderate populace, the citizen who possesses my confidence, the orator who defends my country, and the soldier who has

fought by my side, was among those actions which are always well repaid. The line is drawn across the account: let us close it.

Eschines. I am not insensible, nor have ever been, to the afflicted; my compassion hath been excited in the city and in the field; but when have I been moved, as I am now, to weeping? Your generosity is more pathetic than pity; and at your eloquence, stern as it is, O Phocion, my tears gush like those warm fountains which burst forth suddenly from some convulsion of the earth.

Immortal Gods! that Demades and Polyeuctus and Demosthenes should prevail in the council over Phocion! that even their projects for a

*Cromwell was not cruel. Had he been less sparing of the worst blood in the three kingdoms, the best would never have been spilt upon the scaffold; and England would have been exempt from the ignominy of Sidney's death, Milton's proscription, the sale of the nation to the second Charles, and the transfer of both to Louis.

campaign should be adopted, in preference to that general's who hath defeated Philip in every encounter, and should precipitate the war against the advice of a politician, by whose presages and his only, the Athenians have never been deceived!

Phocion. It is true, I am not popular.

Eschines. Become so.

Phocion. It has been frequently and with impunity in my power to commit base actions; and I abstained: would my friend advise me at last to commit the basest of all? to court the suffrages of people I despise !

Eschines. You court not even those who love and honour you. Thirty times and oftener have you been chosen to lead our armies, and never once were present at the election. Unparalleled glory! when have the Gods shown anything similar among men! Not Aristides nor Epaminondas, the most virtuous of mortals, not Miltiades nor Cimon, the most glorious in their exploits, enjoyed the favour of Heaven so uninterruptedly. No presents, no solicitations, no flatteries, no conces sions you never even asked a vote, however duly, customarily, and gravely.

Phocion. The highest price we can pay for anything is, to ask it: and to solicit a vote appears to me as unworthy an action as to solicit a place in a will it is not ours, and might have been another's.

Eschines. A question unconnected with my visit now obtrudes itself; and indeed, Phocion, I have remarked heretofore that an observation from you has made Athenians, on several occasions, forget their own business and debates, and fix themselves upon it. What is your opinion on the right and expediency of making wills?

Phocion. That it is neither expedient nor just to make them; and that the prohibition would obviate and remove (to say nothing of duplicity and servility) much injustice and discontent; the two things against which every legislator should provide the most cautiously. General and positive laws should secure the order of succession, as far as unto the grandchildren of brother and sister beyond and out of these, property of every kind should devolve to the commonwealth. Thousands have remained unmarried, that, by giving hopes of legacies, they may obtain votes for public offices; thus being dishonest, and making others so, defrauding the community of many citizens by their celibacy, and deteriorating many by their ambition. Luxury and irregular love have produced in thousands the same effect. They care neither about offspring nor about offices, but gratify the most sordid passions at their country's most ruinous expense. If these two descriptions of citizens were prohibited from appointing heirs at their option, and obliged to indemnify the republic for their inutility and nullity, at least by so insensible a fine as that which is levied on them after death, the members would shortly be reduced to few, and much of distress and indigence, much of dishonour and iniquity, would be averted from the people of Athens.

Eschines. But services and friendships... Phocion. are rewarded by friendships and services.

...

Eschines. You have never delivered your opinion upon this subject before the people.

Phocion. While passions and minds are agitated, the fewer opinions we deliver before them the better. We have laws enough; and we should not accustom men to changes. Though many things might be altered and improved, yet alteration in state-matters, important or unimportant in themselves, is weighty in their complex and their consequences. A little car in motion shakes all the houses of a street: let it stand quiet, and you or I could almost bear it on our foot: it is thus with institutions.

Eschines. On wills you have excited my inquiry rather than satisfied it: you have given me new thoughts, but you have also made room for more.

Phocion. Eschines, would you take possession of a vineyard or olive-ground which nobody had given to you?

Eschines. Certainly not.

Phocion. Yet if it were bequeathed by will, you would?

Eschines. Who would hesitate?
Phocion. In many cases the just man.
Eschines. In some indeed.

Phocion. There is a parity in all between a will and my hypothesis of vineyard or olive-ground. Inheriting by means of a will, we take to ourselves what nobody has given.

Eschines. Quite the contrary: we take what he has given who does not deprive himself of any enjoyment or advantage by his gift.

Phocion. Again I say, we take it, Eschines, from no giver at all; for he whom you denominate the giver does not exist: he who does not exist can do nothing, can accept nothing, can exchange nothing, can give nothing.

Eschines. He gave it while he was living, and while he had these powers and faculties.

Phocion. If he gave it while he was living, then it was not what lawyers and jurists and legislators call a will or testament, on which alone we spoke.

Eschines. True; I yield.

Phocion. The absurdities we do not see are more numerous and greater than those we discover; for truly there are few imaginable that have not crept from some corner or other into common use, and these escape our notice by familiarity.

Eschines. We pass easily over great inequalities, and smaller shock us. He who leaps down resolutely and with impunity from a crag of Lycabettos,* may be lamed perhaps for life by missing a step in the descent from a temple.

Again, if you please, to our first question.

Phocion. I would change it willingly for another, if you had not dropped something out of which I collect that you think me too indifferent to the

*Called afterwards Ankesmos.

Eschines. In dangerous and trying times they fall naturally and necessarily, as flies drop out of a curtain let down in winter. Should the people demand of me what better I would propose than my adversaries, such are the extremities to which their boisterousness and levity have reduced us, I can return no answer. We are in the condition of a wolf biting off his leg to escape from the trap that has caught it.

administration of public affairs. Indifference Phocion. Both laws and wars are much addicted to the welfare of our country is a crime; but to the process of generation. Philip, I am afraid, if our country is reduced to a condition in which has prepared the Athenians for his government; the bad are preferred to the good, the foolish and yet I wonder how, in a free state, any man of to the wise, hardly any catastrophe is to be common sense can be bribed. The corrupter deprecated or opposed that may shake them from would only spend his money on persons of some their places. calculation and reflection: with how little of either must those be endowed, who do not see that they are paying a perpetuity for an annuity! Suppose that they, amid suspicions both from him in whose favour, and from those to whose detriment, they betray, can enjoy everything they receive, yet what security have their children and dependents? Property is usually gained in hope no less of bequeathing than of enjoying it; how certain is it that these will lose more than was acquired for them! If they lose their country and their laws, what have they? The bribes of monarchs will be discovered, by the receiver, to be like pieces of furniture given to a man who, on returning home, finds that his house, in which he intended to place them, has another master. I can conceive no bribery at all seductive to the most profligate, short of that which establishes the citizen bribed among the members of a hereditary aristocracy, which in the midst of a people is a kind of foreign state, where the spoiler and traitor may take refuge. Now Philip is not so inhuman, as, in case he should be the conqueror, to inflict on us so humiliating a punishment. Our differences with him are recent, and he marches from policy, not from enmity. The Lacedemonians did indeed attempt it, in the imposition of the thirty tyrants; but such a monstrous state of degradation and of infamy roused us from our torpor, threw under us and beneath our view all other wretchedness, and we recovered (I wish we could retain it as easily!) our independence. What depresses you?

Phocion. Calamities have assaulted mankind in so great a variety of attacks, that nothing new can be devised against them. He who would strike out a novelty in architecture, commits a folly in safety; his house and he may stand: he who attempts it in politics, carries a torch, from which at the first narrow passage we may expect a conflagration. Experience is our only teacher both in war and peace. As we formerly did against the Lacedemonians and their allies, we might by our naval superiority seize or blockade the maritime towns of Philip; we might conciliate Sparta, who has outraged and defied him; we might wait even for his death, impending from drunkenness, lust, ferocity, and inevitable in a short space of time from the vengeance to which they expose him at home. It is a dangerous thing for a monarch to corrupt a nation yet uncivilised; to corrupt a civilised one is the wisest thing he can do.

Eschines. I see no reason why we should not send an executioner to release him from the prison-house of his crimes, with his family to attend him. Kings play at war unfairly with republics : they can only lose some earth and some creatures they value as little, while republics lose in every soldier a part of themselves. Therefore no wise republic ought to be satisfied, unless she bring to punishment the criminal most obnoxious, and those about him who may be supposed to have made him so, his counsellors and his courtiers. Retaliation is not a thing to be feared. You might as reasonably be contented with breaking the tables and chairs of a wretch who hath murdered your children, as with slaying the soldiers of a despot who wages war against you. The least you can do in justice or in safety, is, to demand his blood of the people who are under him, tearing in pieces the nest of his brood. The Locrians have admitted only two new laws in two hundred years; because he who proposes to establish or to change one, comes with a halter round his throat, and is strangled if his proposition is rejected. Let wars, which ought to be more perilous to the adviser, be but equally so: let those who engage in them perish if they lose, I mean the principals, and new wars will be as rare among others as new laws among the Locrians.

Eschines. Oh! could I embody the spirit I receive from you, and present it in all its purity to the Athenians, they would surely hear me with as much attention, as that invoker and violator of the Gods, Demosthenes, to whom my blood would be the most acceptable libation at the feasts of Philip. Pertinacity and clamorousness, he imagines, are tests of sincerity and truth; although we know that a weak orator raises his voice higher than a powerful one, as the lame raise their legs higher than the sound. He censures me for repeating my accusation; he talks of tautology and diffuseness; he who tells us gravely that a man had lived many years, and . . . what then? ... that he was rather old when he died!* Can anything be so ridiculous as the pretensions of this man, who, because I employ no action, says, action is the first, the second, the third requisite of oratory, while he himself is the most ungraceful of our speakers, and, even in appealing to the Gods, begins by scratching his head?

Phocion. This is surely no inattention or indifference to the powers above. Great men lose

* Εβίωδε πολλα ετῆ και ην πρέσβυτερος ότι ετελεύτα.

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