Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
Oliver Cromwell, whose body they hung on their Tyburn Gallows
because he had found the Christian Religion inexecutable in this
country, remains to me by far the remarkablest Governor we have
had here for the last five centuries or so. For the last five
centuries, there has been no Governor among us with anything like
similar talent; and for the last two centuries, no Governor, we
may say, with the possibility of similar talent,--with an idea in
the heart of him capable of inspiring similar talent, capable of
coexisting therewith. When you consider that Oliver believed in
a God, the difference between Oliver's position and that of any
subsequent Governor of this Country becomes, the more you reflect
on it, the more immeasurable!
Oliver, no volunteer in Public Life, but plainly a ballotted
soldier strictly ordered thither, enters upon Public Life;
comports himself there like a man who carried his own life itself
in his hand; like a man whose Great Commander's eye was always
on him. Not without results. Oliver, well-advanced in years,
finds now, by Destiny and his own Deservings, or as he himself
better phrased it, by wondrous successive 'Births of Providence,'
the Government of England put into his hands. In senate-house
and battle-field, in counsel and in action, in private and in
public, this man has proved himself a man: England and the voice
of God, through waste awful whirlwinds and environments, speaking
to his great heart, summon him to assert formally, in the way of
solemn Public Fact and as a new piece of English Law, what
informally and by Nature's eternal Law needed no asserting, That
he, Oliver, was the Ablest-Man of England, the King of England;
that he, Oliver, would undertake governing England. His way of
making this same 'assertion,' the one way he had of making it,
has given rise to immense criticism: but the assertion itself in
what way soever 'made,' is it not somewhat of a solemn one,
somewhat of a tremendous one!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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