What might have been the issue had a vote come on can only be guessed. Things were not allowed to go that length. On Tuesday, Sept, 12, the members, going to the House, found the doors locked, soldiers in and around Westminster Hall, and a summons from the Lord Protector to meet him again in the Painted Chamber. Having assembled there, they listened to Cromwell's "Third Speech." It is one of the most powerful of all his speeches. It began with a long review of his life in general and the steps by which he had recently been brought to the Protectorship. It proceeded then to a recitation of what he called "the witnesses" to his Government, or proofs of its validity--the Witness _above_, or God's manifest Providence in leading him to where he was; the Witness _within_, or his own consciousness of integrity; and the Witnesses _without_, or testimonies of confidence he had received from the Army, the Judges, the City of London, other cities, counties and boroughs, and public bodies of all sorts. "I believe," he said, "that, if the learnedest men in this nation were called to show a precedent, equally clear, of a Government so many ways approved of, they would not in all their search, find it." Then, coming to the point, he asked what right the present Parliament had to come after all those witnesses and challenge his authority. Had they not been elected under writs issued by him, in which writs it was expressly inserted, by regulation of Article XII. of the Constitutional Instrument of the Protectorate, "That the persons elected shall not have power to alter the Government as it is hereby settled in one Single Person and a Parliament"? On this point he was very emphatic. "That _your_ judgments, who are persons sent from all parts of the nation under the notion of approving this Government--for _you_ to disown or not to own it; for _you_ to act with Parliamentary authority especially in the disowning of it, contrary to the very fundamental things, yea against the very root of this Establishment; to sit and not own the Authority by which you sit:--is that which I believe astonisheth more men than myself." A revision of the Constitution of the Protectorate in _circumstantials_ he would not object to, but the _fundamentals_ must be left untouched. And let those hearing him be under no mistake as to his own resolution. "The wilful throwing away of this Government, such as it is, so owned of God, so approved by men, so witnessed to in the fundamentals of it as was mentioned above, were a thing which,--and in reference not to _my_ good, but to the good of these Nations and Posterity,--I can sooner be willing to be rolled into my grave, and buried with infamy, than I can give my consent unto." He had therefore called them now that they might come to an understanding. There was a written parchment in the lobby of the Parliament House to which he requested the signatures of such as might see fit. The doors of the