After the battle of Worcester, Cromwell lost, in a measure, his democratic sympathies, and naturally, in view of the great excesses of the party with which he had been identified. That he desired the public good we cannot reasonably doubt; and he adapted himself to those circumstances which seemed to advance it, and which a spirit of wild democratic license assuredly did not. So far as it contributed to overturn the throne of the Stuarts, and the whole system of public abuses, civil and ecclesiastical, Cromwell favored it. But no further. When it seemed subversive of law and order, the grand ends of all civil governments, then he opposed it. And in this he showed that he was much more conservative in his spirit than has often been supposed; and, in this conservatism he resembled Luther and other great reformers, who were not unreflecting incendiaries, as is sometimes thought--men who destroy, but do not reconstruct. Luther, at heart, was a conservative, and never sought a change to which he was not led by strong inward tempests--forced to make it by the voice of his conscience, which he ever obeyed, and loyalty to which so remarkably characterized the early reformers, and no class of men more than the Puritans. Cromwell abhorred the government of Charles, because it was not a government which respected justice, and which set at defiance the higher laws of God. It was not because Charles violated the constitution, it was because he violated truth and equity, and the nation's good, that he opposed him. Cromwell usurped his prerogatives, and violated the English constitution; but he did not transgress those great primal principles of truth, for which constitutions are made. He looked beyond constitutions to abstract laws of justice; and it never can be laid to his charge that he slighted these, or proved a weak or wicked ruler. He quarrelled with parliament, because the parliament wished to perpetuate its existence unlawfully and meanly, and was moreover unwilling and unable to cope with many difficulties which constantly arose. It may be supposed that Cromwell may thus have thought: "I will not support the parliament, for it will not maintain law; it will not legislate wisely or beneficently; it seeks its own, not the nation's good. And therefore I take away its existence, and rule myself; for I have the fear of God before my eyes, and am determined to rule by his laws, and to advance his glory." Deluded he was; blinded by ambition he may have been but he sought to elevate his country; and his efforts in her behalf are appreciated and praised by the very men who are most severe on his undoubted usurpation. [Sidenote: The Rump Parliament.] [Sidenote: Dispersion of the Parliament.]