The speech which the Protector delivered to the members may rank as the ablest which is known to have fallen from his lips. There can be no doubt that he would personally have preferred the retention of the Instrument as it stood, but he was aware of the objections taken to it, and all that we know leads us to believe that those objections were shared by members of his own Council. At all events, after a justification of his own conduct in relation to the preparation of the Instrument, and an argument that it had been accepted by the electors who had been bound by its terms to acknowledge the settlement of the Government in a single person and Parliament, he proceeded to offer a compromise. He was prepared to substitute for the Instrument a Parliamentary constitution, provided that four conditions were admitted as fundamentals to be handed down to posterity as unassailable. The first was that the country was to be governed by a single person and a Parliament; the second, that Parliaments were not to make themselves perpetual; the third, that liberty of conscience should be respected; the fourth, that neither Protector nor Parliament should have absolute power over the militia. It speaks volumes for Oliver's power of seeing into the heart of a situation, that whilst the Instrument of Government, and the absolute supremacy of a single House with power to defy dissolution, have alike passed into the realms of unrealised theory, every one of Oliver's fundamentals has been adopted by the nation--not indeed in any written constitution, but with the stronger and more enduring guarantee of a practice accepted beyond dispute by the conscience of the people itself. The four fundamentals on behalf of which he now appealed to the House formed the political legacy bequeathed by him to posterity. To obtain acquiescence in this compromise, Oliver directed that no member should take his seat who refused to sign the following declaration: "I do hereby freely promise and engage to be true and faithful to the Lord Protector and the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland, and shall not, according to the tenor of the indentures whereby I am returned to serve in this present Parliament, propose or give my consent to alter the Government as it is settled in one person and a Parliament". Those who refused subscription were excluded from all participation in the business of the House.