and they could not wait to attain it by slow accommodations to sense and habit. They believed that God through them was ‘casting the kingdoms old into another mould,’ and in the pride of triumphant reason they took pleasure in trampling on the common feelings and interests, through which reason must work, if it is to work at all. In the writings of Milton, the true exponent of the higher spirit of the republic, we find on the one hand a perfect scorn of the dignities and plausibilities then as now recognised in England (which makes him the best study for a radical orator that I am acquainted with), on the other, a free admission of the sensual degradation of the people, which estranged them from a government founded on reason. In the latter respect there is a marked contrast between the language he held at the beginning of the war, when ‘he saw in his mind a noble and puissant nation rousing itself like a strong man after sleep,’ and the language of the ‘Eiconoclastes,’ where he admits that the people ‘with a besotted and degenerate baseness of spirit, except some few who yet retain in them the old English {330} fortitude and love of freedom, imbastardised from the ancient nobleness of their ancestors, are ready to fall flat and give adoration to the image and memory of this man, who hath more put tyranny into an act than any British king before him.’ To him, throughout, the puritan war had seemed a crisis in the long struggle between the spirit and the flesh, a great effort to reclaim the spirit from ‘the outward and customary eye-service of the body,’ and a system of political asceticism was its proper result. Such a system to its believing supporters was the commonwealth. Its claim was not gradually to transmute, but suddenly to suppress, the feeling of the many by the reason of the few; a claim which all the while belied itself, for it appealed to popular, and even natural right, and which implied no concrete power of political reconstruction. It was a democracy without a δημος, [2] it rested on an assertion of the supremacy of reason, which from its very exclusiveness gave the reason no work to do. [1] [Wordsworth, _Ruth_.] [2] [Greek demos = people, Tr.]