In the seventeenth century it inspires the statesmen of England not only with the ardour for constitutional freedom, but engages them in ceaseless and not unavailing efforts towards a deeper conception of justice and of liberty, foreshadowing unconsciously the ideals of later times. If the Thirty Years' War did nothing else for England it implanted in her great statesmen a profound distrust of the imperial systems of the Bourbons and the Hapsburgs. Eliot, for instance, in the work entitled _The Monarchy of Man_, lofty in its form as in its thought, written in his prison, though studying Plato and the older ideals of empire, is yet obscurely searching after a new ideal. We encounter a similar effort in the great Montrose, capable of that Scottish campaign, and of writing one of the finest love-songs in the language, capable also of some very vivid thoughts on statesmanship. In natures like Eliot and Montrose, the height of the ideal determines the steadfastness of the action. And that ideal, I repeat, is distinct from Plato's, distinct from Dante's, and from that of the Bourbon and Hapsburg empires, in which Dante's conception is but rudely or imperfectly developed. The ideal of these English statesmen is framed upon another conception of justice, another conception of freedom, equally sublime, and more catholic and humane. Whatever its immediate influence upon certain of their contemporaries, over their own hearts it was all-powerful. The very vividness with which they conceive the ideal, and the noble constancy with which they pursue it, link the high purposes of these two men to the purposes of Milton, of Cromwell, of Selden, and of Falkland. The perfect State, the scope of its laws, government, religion, to each is manifest, though the path that leads thither may seem now through Monarchy, now through a Republic, or at other times indistinct, or lost altogether in the bewildering maze of adverse interests. From the remote nature of their quest arises much of the apparent inconsistency in the political life of that era. The parting of Pym and Strafford acquires an added, a tragic poignancy from the consciousness in the heart of each that the star which leads him on is the star of England's destiny.