The Convention gradually grew conscious that it had no support in popular sympathy, and dissolved of its own motion, after having named a Council of State, which drew up a remarkable Constitution under the name of the “Instrument of Government.” This Instrument was adopted by Cromwell and the Council of Officers, and under it a new Parliament was convened. Even yet, Cromwell, and at least the majority of the army, shrank from abandoning every effort at constitutional rule in favor of the naked power of the sword. Nevertheless, Cromwell had even less fondness for the rule of a Parliament elected under any conditions he was able to devise. He realized that the majority of the nation was against him, and dreaded lest it might take steps toward the rehabilitation of the monarchy. In his address to the Barebones Convention he had dwelt with special emphasis upon the fact that a Parliament elected merely by the majority might not be nearly so suitable for doing the Lord’s work as such an assembly as that he had convened. In short, all his qualities, both good and bad, tended to render the forms and the narrowly limited powers of constitutional government irksome to him. His strength, his intensity of conviction, his delight in exercising powers for what he conceived to be good ends; his dislike of speculative reforms and his inability to appreciate the necessity of theories to a practical man who wishes to do good work; his hatred of both King and oligarchy, while he utterly distrusted a popular majority; his tendency to insist upon the superiority of the moral law, as he saw it, to the laws of mankind round about him—all these tendencies worked together to unfit him for the task of helping a liberty-loving people on the road toward freedom. The Instrument of Government was a very remarkable document. It was a written constitution. Cromwell and his soldiers desired, like Washington and his fellow-members of the Constitutional Convention which framed the government of the United States, to have the fundamental law of the land put in shape where it would be accessible to all men, and where its terms would not be open to doubt. Such a course was absolutely necessary if a free government, in the modern sense, was to be established on radically new lines. It has not been rendered necessary in the free England of to-day, because, very fortunately, England has been able to reach her freedom by evolution, not revolution.