WnAT THE Age owes to America. 
337 
tive shares in authoritv of ranks and orders of men, which indeed 
had ruled and advanced the development of society in civil and re¬ 
ligious liberty, but might well be neglected when the protected 
growth was assured, and all tutelary supervision, for this reason, 
henceforth could only be obstructive and incongruous. 
ENGLISH AND FRENCH REPUBLICS. 
A glance at the fate of the English essay at a commonwealth 
which preceded, and to the French experiment at a republic, which 
followed our own institution “ of a new state of a new species,” 
will show the marvelous wisdom of our ancestors, which struck the 
line between too little and too much; which walked by faith indeed 
for things invisible, but yet by sight for things visible; which dared 
to appropriate everything to the people which had belonged to 
Cresar, but to assume for mortals nothing that belonged to God. 
No doubt it was a deliberation of prodigious difficulty, a decision 
of infinite moment, which should settle the new institutions of Eng¬ 
land 'after the execution of the king, and determine whether they 
should be popular or monarchical. The problem was too vast for 
Cromwell and the great men who stood about him, and halting be¬ 
tween the only possible opinions, they simply robbed the throne of 
stability, without giving to the people the choice of their rulers. 
Had Cromwell assumed the state and style of king, and assigned 
the constitutional limits of prerogative, the statesmen of England 
would have anticipated the establishment of 1688, and saved the 
disgraces of the intervening record. If, on the other hand, the ever- 
recurring consent ot the people in vesting the chief magistracy had 
been accepted for the constitution of the state, the revolution 
would have been intelligible, and might have proved permanent. 
But what a “Lord Protector” was, nobody knew, and what he 
might grow to be, everybody wondered and feared. The aristoc¬ 
racy could endure no dignity above them less than a king’s. The 
people knew the measure and the title of the chartered liberties 
which had been wrested or yielded from the king’s prerogative; 
but what the division between them and a lord protector would be 
no one could forcast. A brief fluttering between the firmament 
above and the firm earth beneath, with no poise with either, and 
the discordant scheme was rolled away as a scroll. A hundred 
years afterward, Montesquieu derided “ this impotent effort of the 
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