Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/60

 hell. Indeed, if in insisting on some explanations being given with respect to the monstrous abuses of the civil list, and if in affirming his preference for a constitutional republic based on merit to a monarchy, however limited, founded on birth, he had shown more anger and less reason, sneers would have been regarded as the only weapon necessary to employ against him. It was the very fact that he used arguments which every snob in England knew to be unanswerable that the royalist tempest—what I may call the "white terror"—was evoked.

It may here be convenient to consider the republican episode in his career. There can be no doubt that royalty was alarmed, that its numerous hangers-on were alarmed, and that the privileged classes generally, whose own existence depends on the maintenance of the monarchical superstition as an article of the popular faith, were thoroughly alarmed.

"Kings most commonly," says Milton, "though strong in legions, are but weak at argument, as they who have ever been accustomed from their cradle to use their will only as their right hand, their reason always as their left. Whence, unexpectedly constrained to that kind of combat, they prove but weak and puny adversaries." The Royalists made up for the weakness of their arguments by the weight of their brickbats. At Bolton, while Sir Charles was addressing a large audience admitted by ticket, the place of meeting was assailed by a furious mob of Royalists, who succeeded in murdering one peaceable Radical, William Scofield, a working-man, and wounding several others. The magistrates and the police both scandalously failed in their duty on the occasion, and to this day their conduct has never been adequately explained.