But by the time he became Lord Protector he was too impatient of difference of opinion, too doggedly convinced of his own righteousness and wisdom, to be really fit to carry on a free government. He had sought to introduce the reign of the saints; but when, in the Barebones Parliament, he gathered together the very men whom he deemed their arch-representatives, it was only to find, as was of course inevitable, that he and they could not agree as to the method of realizing the reign of the saints in this very material world. Then he sought to secure a government by the representatives of the people: only to find that he got along even less well with them than with the saints. In short, while he had kept his nobility of purpose, his whole character had grown less and less such as to fit him to found a government of the kind toward which his race was dimly striving. He made varied experiments for the control of England. After the first Protectorate Parliament had been abolished, he established the government of the major-generals, or in other words, purely military rule; dividing England into a dozen districts, with a major-general over each as the ultimate authority. The prime function of the major-generals was to keep order, and they crushed under their iron heels every spark of Royalist insurrection, or of Leveller and Anabaptist uprising. They interfered in civil matters also, and were especially required to see to the rigid observance of the Sabbath, and to suppress all cock-fighting, horse-racing, and kindred sports, as well as to shut up doubtful ale-houses. There certainly never was a more extraordinary despotism than this; the despotism of a man who sought power, not to gratify himself, or those belonging to him, in any of the methods to which all other tyrants have been prone; but to establish the reign of the Lord, as he saw it. Here was a tyrant who used the overwhelming strength of his military force to forbid what he considered profane amusements, and to enforce on one day of the week a system of conduct which was old-Jewish in character. Of course the fact that he meant well, and that his motives were high, did not make it any the easier for the people with whose pleasures and prejudices he thus irritatingly interfered.