If the Commonwealth leaders were immersed in preparations for war, the officers of the army had not forgotten their demand for reforms in Church and State, and in contemplating the slackness of Parliament with regard to these reforms, their minds were again set on a dissolution of Parliament at a time far earlier than that which had been fixed by the House itself. Towards the end of July the Army Council--now composed of officers alone--had considered a petition to be addressed to Parliament, and had asked 'that a new representative be forthwith elected'. When the petition was finally submitted to Parliament, this clause had given place to another merely requesting Parliament to consider of some qualifications which would secure 'the election only of such as are pious and faithful in the interests of the Commonwealth to sit and serve as members in the said Parliament,' in this way shifting from a demand for a dissolution to be followed by a general election, to a demand for partial elections to fill up existing vacancies. Though no direct evidence exists, there are strong reasons for believing that this substitution was made in consequence of Cromwell's intervention. Even then he did not append his signature to the petition. It was as a mediator--not as a partisan--that Cromwell bore himself at the time when the army--after an interval of more than two years and a half--once more began to put pressure on Parliament. On the one hand Parliament was not only discredited by its inability to undertake the reforms demanded, but still more by the widely spread belief that many of its members had made full use of their opportunities to feather their own nests. On the other hand, this discredited House, though, mutilated as it was, it had scarcely a semblance of constitutional right, was yet the only body remaining in existence to which even a semblance appertained. Cromwell might not be an authority on constitutional law, but he had an instinctive apprehension for the truth on which all constitutional law is based--that the first thing necessary in the institutions of any country is not that they shall be theoretically defensible, but that they should meet with general acceptance. Those who like ourselves can look back on that stirring time from the safe vantage ground which we occupy, can see that, so far as constitutional questions were concerned, the work of the men of the seventeenth century was to substitute Parliament for the Crown as the basis of authority, and we have, accordingly, considerable difficulty in placing ourselves in the position of those to whom only part of the drama had been unrolled. In 1652, at least, it was impossible to appeal to the truncated Parliament as in any way representing the nation. Yet how was it possible to base authority on any new Parliament which should even approximate to such a representation? Except with extreme theorists there was no desire to evoke such a spectre. Already in 1650