the best sense of any one man;” and this is undoubtedly true of all people sufficiently high in the scale to be fit for self-government. Oliver surely strove to live up to his lights as he saw them. He never acted in levity, or from mere motives of personal aggrandizement, and he saw, with sad, piercing eyes, the dangers that rolled around the path he had chosen. He acted as he did because he conscientiously felt that only thus could he meet the needs of the nation. He said to the second Protectorate Parliament: “I am a man standing in the place I am in; which place I undertook, not so much out of hope of doing any good, as out of a desire to prevent mischief and evil—which I did see was imminent on the nation (for we were running along into confusion and disorder, and would have necessarily run into blood).” [Illustration: Exterior of Westminster Hall. After Charles II. succeeded to the throne, the bones of Cromwell were disinterred and his head exposed upon a pole over Westminster Hall, almost on the identical spot where the Cromwell statue, shown in the right of the drawing, has just been erected. ] We are often told that the best of all possible governments would be a benevolent despotism. Oliver’s failure is a sufficient commentary upon this dictum of the parlor doctrinaires. There never has been, and probably never will be, another despotism where the despot so sincerely strove to do, for a people capable of some measure of freedom, better than they themselves would have done with that freedom. The truth is, that a strong nation can only be saved by itself, and not by a strong man, though it can be greatly aided and guided by a strong man. A weak nation may be doomed anyhow, or it may find its sole refuge in a despot; a nation struggling out of darkness may be able to take its first steps only by the help of a master hand, as was true of Russia, under Peter the Great; and if a nation, whether free or unfree, loses the capacity for self-government, loses the spirit of sobriety and of orderly liberty, then it has no cause to complain of tyranny; but a really great people, a people really capable of freedom and of doing mighty deeds in the world, must work out its own destiny, and must find men who will be its leaders—not its masters. Cromwell could, in all probability, have been such a leader at the end as he was during his early years of public life; and when he permitted himself to fall from the position of a leader among free men, to that of a master over men for whose welfare he sincerely strove, but in whose freedom he did not believe, he marred the great work he had done. Nevertheless, it was a very great work. There are dark blots on his career—especially his Irish policy—but on the whole he was a mighty force for good and against evil, and the good that he did, though buried for the moment with his bones, rose again and has lived for ever since, while the evil has long withered, or is now withering.