And even if in accordance with the common
belief, we ascribe English freedom and prosperity and good government to
the final triumph of the popular side, yet deeper consideration should
suggest that such retrospective judgments are always inevitably made
under our human entire ignorance what might have been the result had the
opposite party prevailed. Who should say how often, in case of these
long and wide extended struggles,--political and dynastic,--the effects
which we confidently claim as _propter hoc_, are only _post hoc_ in the
last reality?
Waiving however these somewhat remote and what many will judge
over-sceptical considerations, this is certain, that unless we can purify
our judgment from reading into the history of the past the long results
of time;--from ascribing to the men of the seventeenth century prophetic
insight into the nineteenth;--unless, in short, we can free ourselves
from the chain of present or personal prepossessions;--no approach can be
made to a fair or philosophical judgment upon such periods of strife and
crisis as our Civil War preeminently offers.
C: p. 108
_With glory he gilt_; Yet to readers, (if such readers there be) who can
look with an undazzled eye on military success, or hear the still small
voice of truth through the tempest of rhetoric, Cromwell's foreign
policy, (excepting the isolated case of his interference with the then
comparatively feeble powers of Savoy and the Papacy on behalf of the
persecuted Waldenses), will be far from supporting the credit with which
politico-theological partisanship has invested it.
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