HISTOEY OP ENGLAND,

• thrown on the world: and experience seemed to warrant thebelief that this change would produce much misery and crime,that the discharged veterans would be seen begging in everystreet, or that they would be driven by hunger to pillage.But no such result followed. In a few months there remainednot a trace indicating that the most formidable army in theworld had just been absorbed into the mass of the community.The Royalists themselves confessed that, in every depart-ment of honest industry, the discarded warriors prosperedbeyond other men, that none was charged with any theft orrobbery, that none was heard to ask an alms, and that, if abaker, a mason, or a waggoner attracted notice by his dili-gence and sobriety, he was in all probability one of Oliver’sold soldiers.

The military tyranny had passed away; but it had leftdeep and enduring traces in the public mind. The name ofa standing army was long held in abhorrence: and it isremarkable that this feeling was even stronger among the' Cavaliers than among the Roundheads. It ought to be con-sidered as a most fortunate circumstance that, when ourcountry was, for the first and last time, ruled by the sword,the sword was in the hands, not of her legitimate princes, butof those rebels who slew the King and demolished the Church.Had a prince, with a title as good as that of Charles, com-manded an army as good as that of Cromwell, there wouldhave been little hope indeed for the liberties of England.Happily that instrument by which alone the monarchy couldbe made absolute became an object of peculiar horror anddisgust to the monarchical party, and long continued to beinseparably associated in the imagination of Royalists andPrelatists with regicide and field preaching. A century afterthe death of Cromwell, the Tories still continued to clamouragainst every augmentation of the regular soldiery, and tosound the praise of a national militia. So late as the year