We have many precedents upon the part of the "Guardian of Civilization," which may or may not guide us. Not to return to that age "whereunto the memory of man runneth not to the contrary," "the day of King Richard our grandfather," and to the Wars of the Roses, we will begin with the happy occasion of the Restoration of King Charles of merry and disreputable fame. Since he came back to his kingdoms on sufferance and as a convenient compromise between anarchy and despotism, he could hardly afford the luxury of wholesale proscription. What the returning Royalists could, they did. It was obviously unsafe, as well as ungrateful, to hang General Monk in presence of his army, many of whom had followed the "Son of the Man" from Worcester Fight in hot pursuit, and had hunted him from thicket to thicket of Boscobel Wood. But to dig up the dead Cromwell and Ireton, to suspend them upon the gallows, to mark out John Milton, old and blind, for poverty and contempt, was both safe and pleasant. And civilization was guarded accordingly. One little bit of comfort, however, was permitted. Scotland had been the Virginia of his day, and Charles had the satisfaction of hearing that the Whigs, who had betrayed and sold his father, and who had (a far worse offence) made himself listen to three-hours' sermons, were chased like wild beasts among the hills, after the defeat of Bothwell Brigg. But what Charles could not do was permitted to his brother. After the rebellion of Monmouth was put down, the West of England was turned to mourning. From the princely bastard who sued in agony and vain humiliation, to the clown of Devon forced into the rebel ranks,--from the peer who plotted, to the venerable and Christian woman whose sole crime was sheltering the houseless and starving fugitive, there was given to the vanquished no mercy but the mercy of Jeffreys, no tenderness but the tenderness of Kirk. But the House of Stuart was not always to represent the side of victory. Thirty years after the Rout of Sedgemoor, the son of James, whose name was clouded by rumor with the same stain of spuriousness as that of his unfortunate cousin, was proclaimed by the Earl of Mar. The Jacobites were forced to drink to the dregs the cup of bitterness they had so gladly administered to others. Over Temple Bar and London Bridge the heads of the defeated rebels bore witness to the guardianship of civilization as understood in the eighteenth century.