I should say also of that
Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell's--notwithstanding the abuse it has
encountered, and the denial of everybody that it was able to get on in
the world, and so on--it appears to me to have been the most salutary
thing in the modern history of England on the whole. If Oliver
Cromwell had continued it out, I don't know what it would have come
to. It would have got corrupted perhaps in other hands, and could
not have gone on, but it was pure and true to the last fibre in his
mind--there was truth in it when he ruled over it.
Machiavelli has remarked, in speaking about the Romans, that
democracy cannot exist anywhere in the world; as a Government it is an
impossibility that it should be continued, and he goes on proving that
in his own way. I do not ask you all to follow him in his conviction
(hear); but it is to him a clear truth that it is a solecism and
impossibility that the universal mass of men should govern themselves.
He says of the Romans that they continued a long time, but it was
purely in virtue of this item in their constitution--namely, that they
had all the conviction in their minds that it was solemnly necessary
at times to appoint a Dictator--a man who had the power of life and
death over everything--who degraded men out of their places, ordered
them to execution, and did whatever seemed to him good in the name
of God above him.
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