being hanged, first by Scroggs, and then by Jeffreys, he would,
after manfully opposing James the Second through years of
tyranny, have been seized with a fit of compassion, at the very
moment of the Revolution, have voted for a regency, and died a
non-juror.

We do not dispute that the royal party contained many excellent
men and excellent citizens. But this we say, that they did not
discern those times. The peculiar glory of the Houses of
Parliament is that, in the great plague and mortality of
constitutions, they took their stand between the living and the
dead. At the very crisis of our destiny, at the very moment when
the fate which had passed on every other nation was about to pass
on England, they arrested the danger.

Those who conceive that the parliamentary leaders were desirous
merely to maintain the old constitution, and those who represent
them as conspiring to subvert it, are equally in error. The old
constitution, as we have attempted to show, could not be
maintained. The progress of time, the increase of wealth, the
diffusion of knowledge, the great change in the European system
of war, rendered it impossible that any of the monarchies of the
middle ages should continue to exist on the old footing. The
prerogative of the crown was constantly advancing. If the
privileges of the people were to remain absolutely stationary,
they would relatively retrograde. The monarchical and
democratical parts of the government were placed in a situation
not unlike that of the two brothers in the Fairy Queen, one of
whom saw the soil of his inheritance daily, washed away by the
tide and joined to that of his rival. The portions had at first