the earth--I would have been glad to have lived under my wood side to have kept a flock of sheep, rather than to have undertaken such a government as this. But undertaking it by the advice and petition of you, I did look that you who had offered it unto me should make it good." Such language must appear to those who judge by the recorded words and actions of this Parliament to be without adequate justification. It is undeniable that the constitution contained no definition of the powers of the new House, and if there had been no other than the ostensible question at issue, it would have been unreasonable in Oliver to hurry on a crisis before attempting, directly or indirectly, to suggest terms of compromise. As a matter of fact this question of the other House was very far from covering the whole ground of debate. A petition to which thousands of signatures were appended was being circulated in the City, asking for a complete restitution of Parliamentary supremacy and--no doubt to catch the support of a certain section of the army--for an enactment that no officer or soldier should be cashiered without the sentence of a court martial. Oliver was perfectly right in holding that the attack on the other House was equivalent to an assault on the constitutional Protectorate. He had himself looked to that House as restoring to him in another form the powers which he had abandoned when he let fall the Instrument. By keeping in his own hands the selection of its members, and providing that that House should have a veto on subsequent nominations--the principle of inheritance being totally excluded--he imagined that he had sufficiently provided for the future. His objects in so doing may be taken as those set forth by a writer who had ample means of gathering his intentions. "It was no small task for the Protector to find idoneous men for this place, because the future security of the honest interest seemed--under God--to be laid up in them; for by a moral generation, if they were well chosen at the first, they would propagate their own kind, when the single person could not, and the Commons, who represented the nation, would not, having in them for the most part the spirit of those they represent, which hath little affinity with a respect of the cause of God." It is easy to criticise such a principle from a modern point of view. Yet if the morality of Oliver's political actions are ever to be judged fairly, it must never be forgotten that the right of an honest Government to prevent the people from injuring themselves by out-voting the saner members of the community was--rather than any democratic or Parliamentary theory--the predominant note of his career. It is this at least which explains his assent to the choice of the nominated Parliament, as well as his breach with the Parliaments which he dismissed in 1655 and 1658.