There are not wanting those who utterly disparage the morals of the Commonwealth, and affirm that both Cromwell and his followers generally were guilty of as base conduct as King Charles and his courtiers, and that the only difference was that which exists between covert and open practices of an evil nature. The fact remains, however, that even down to the present day the English people, and the American as well, are inheritors of the spirit of the Puritans, to the great good of society. It was the Puritans who taught reverence for the Sabbath and made the Bible a common textbook of life; and although they were strict and narrow in their views, earnestness always is straitened in its bounds until it bursts them and floods society with the power of the principles it advocates. The apologists for King Charles, who hold to the ancient formula of the faith of the Fathers and of the Puritans,--that woman from the days of Eden unto the present time has stood for the downfall of man,--seek to enlist sympathy for him by saying that in his various peccadilloes the women seemed to be the aggressors. This plea, which was advanced by his friendly contemporaries, who sought to whitewash the outside of the sepulchre of the king's character while leaving undisturbed the inward corruption, is still gravely repeated by partisan historians to-day. Sir John Reresby said: "I have since heard the King say they would sometimes offer themselves to his embrace." It is unfortunate that the integrity of the chivalrous king should have suffered such assaults; but as no other English monarch seems to have been so desperately set upon to his destruction by the women of his times, it may not be too great a piece of temerity to put in a plea for the women of the reign of the glorious Charles II. by suggesting the bare possibility that all the moral probity was not possessed alone by him who reigned King of England! We can much better accept the description of society given by Clarendon. It is not, however, to be taken as an index to the innate perversity of woman in wicked ways, but as indicating the natural effect of the lowering of the esteem in which the sex was held by the evil living of men in the higher circles of society. Yet not all the indictments which are brought forward by Clarendon would be considered to-day as of a serious nature. He comments: "The young women conversed without any circumspection of modesty, and frequently met at taverns and common eating-houses; they who were stricter and more severe in their comportment became the wives of the seditious preachers or of officers of the army. The daughters of noble and illustrious families bestowed themselves upon the divines of the time, or other low and unequal matches. Parents had no manner of authority over their children, nor children any obedience or submission to their parents, but every one did that which was good in his own eyes."