The bad effect of sudden and violent changes may best be observed in our own history. The great changes of the Civil War left England without any checks on the violence of parties. The King and Lords had been abolished, and the Commons ruled alone. The fierce factions of the Presbyterians and Independents would have wrecked the country, had not a ruler come forward far more arbitrary than the one already rejected. Charles had looked over the wall when he tried to arrest five members, but Cromwell stole the horse outright when he dismissed the parliament by armed force. Pride's Purge was a greater violation of popular liberties than anything done by Tudor or Stuart; and the effect of half a generation of such violence was that the nation was heartily glad to get back a worse king than the one they had beheaded. Cromwell's great service was, that he saved England from a fanatical and factious House of Commons, by exercising monarchical prerogatives which Charles never dared to assert. The needs of the time drove him, as a capable man, to act for the highest good outside the law. When we hear a faction lauding Cromwell now, it may be overlooked that he made short work of Fifth Monarchy men and other extremists; and that the great struggle of mind to him was the dire necessity of crushing the factions, and of using that compulsion which he clearly saw was the only alternative to anarchy. The bitter persecuting spirit of the factions was far more violent than any course of action which preceded or followed their rule. Neither Charles I nor Charles II touched the private religious actions of the people; but the factions proscribed even the private use of the Book of Common Prayer. The subsequent Five-mile Act regulating public meetings for worship was mild compared with the domiciliary visitations in search of the Prayer Book in 1645. But for the visits of the parliamentary soldiery, breaking into chapels and putting their swords to the breasts of the kneeling communicants, there would never have been the milder dispersions of the Restoration. But for the bitter persecution of the so-called Malignants, and the deprivation of the clergy throughout the country by the parliament, there would never have been the milder reversion of Bartholomew's Day, 1662. In every point the violent changes of constitution wrought more tyranny and more personal hardship than was even caused by the revulsion which followed. In France the same effect was seen. The Revolution probably caused more bloodshed and more personal misery in ten years, than the old _régime_ had done in a century. England has paid twenty-five millions a year for a century past as interest on the debt incurred for crushing Napoleon.