THREE ENGLISH STATESMEN.

I.

PY M.

LET us never glorify revolution. Statesmanship is the art of avoiding it, and of making progress at once continuous and calm. Revolutions are not only full of all that a good citizen and a good Christian hates while they last, but they leave a long train of bitterness behind. The energy and the exaltation of character which they call forth are paid for in the lassitude, the depression, the political infidelity which ensue. The great spirits of the English Revolution were followed by the men of Charles II. Whatever of moral grandeur there was in the French Revolution was followed by Bonapartism and Talleyrand. Even while the

great men are on the scene, violence and oneそう

B

sidedness mar their greatness. Let us pray that all our political contests may be carried on as the contests of fellow citizen, and beneath the unassailed majesty of law. But the chiefest authors of revolutions have been not the chimerical and intemperate friends of progress, but the blind obstructers of progress; those who, in defiance of nature, struggle to avert the inevitable future, to recall the irrevocable past; who chafe to fury by damming up its course the river which would otherwise flow calmly between its banks, which has ever flowed, and which, do what they will, must flow for ever.

If a revolution ever was redeemed by its grandeur, it was the revolution which was opened by Pym, which was closed by Cromwell, of which Milton was the apostle and the poet. The material forces have been seen in action on a more imposing scale, the moral forces never. Why is that regard for principle, which was so strong among us then, comparatively so weak among us now? The greatest member of parliament that ever lived, the greatest master of the convictions and the feelings of the House of Commons, was not Robert Peel, but John Pym. But if Pym, in modern garb and