There was undoubtedly one very important matter of past controversy, which they may seem to have avoided, the power over the militia. They silently gave up that momentous question. Yet it was become, in a practical sense, incomparably more important that the representatives of the Commons should retain a control over the land forces of the nation than it had been at the commencement of the controversy. War and usurpation had sown the dragon's teeth in our fields; and, instead of the peaceable trained bands of former ages, the citizen soldiers who could not be marched beyond their counties, we had a veteran army accustomed to tread upon the civil authority at the bidding of their superiors, and used alike to govern and obey. It seemed prodigiously dangerous to give up this weapon into the hands of our new sovereign. The experience of other countries as well as our own demonstrated that public liberty could never be secure, if a large standing army should be kept on foot, or any standing army without consent of parliament. But this salutary restriction the convention parliament did not think fit to propose; and in this respect I certainly consider them as having stopped short of adequate security. It is probable that the necessity of humouring Monk, whom it was their first vote to constitute general of all the forces in the three kingdoms,[522] with the hope, which proved not vain, that the king himself would disband the present army whereon he could so little rely, prevented any endeavour to establish the control of parliament over the military power, till it was too late to withstand the violence of the cavaliers, who considered the absolute prerogative of the Crown in that point the most fundamental article of their creed.