Yet, though it must be freely admitted that in its later years the government of Cromwell was in form and substance a tyranny, it must be no less freely acknowledged that he used with wisdom and grandeur the power he had usurped. The faults he committed were the faults of the age, rather than special to himself, while his sincerity and honesty were peculiarly his own. [Illustration: Sir William Waller. From the Portrait by Sir Peter Lely at Goodwood. By permission of the Duke of Richmond and Gordon, K.G. ] He fairly carried out his pledge of healing and settling, and he put through a long series of administrative reforms. In England and Wales his internal administration undoubtedly told for what was of moral and material advantage to the country; and if there was heavy taxation, at least it produced visible and tangible results, which was never the case under the Stuarts, before or after him. Yet his rule could not but produce discontent. In the first place, the Royalists were not well treated. In that age the beaten party was expected to pay heavily for its lack of success, both in purse and in body; and it was not to be expected that the victorious Puritans should show toward their defeated foes the generosity displayed by Grant and his fellow-victors in the American Civil War. In the American Revolution, the Tories were at first followed with much the same vindictiveness that the Royalists were followed after King Charles had been brought to the block. But Washington and all the leading American statesmen disapproved of this, and after the first heat of passion was over the American Royalists were allowed precisely the same civil and political rights as their neighbors. On the contrary, in England, under the Commonwealth, the Royalists were kept disfranchised, and taxation was arranged so as always to fall with crushing weight upon them, thus insuring their permanent alienation. As regards the rest of the people, while there was considerable interference with political and religious liberty, it was probably only what the times demanded, and was certainly much less than occurred in almost any other country. Episcopalians were denied the use of the Prayer-Book, and, like the Catholics, were given liberty of conscience only on condition that they should not practise their faith in public. Irritating though this was, and wrong though it was, it fell infinitely short of what had been done to Protestants, under Queen Mary, by the temporarily victorious Catholics, or to Puritans and Catholics under Queen Elizabeth, or of what was to be done to the Covenanters of Scotland, under the victorious Episcopalians; but such considerations would not have altered the discontent, even had the discontented kept them in mind. When provocation is sufficient to drive a man into revolution, it matters little in practical politics how much beyond this point it is carried. The breaking-point is reached sooner in some