Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/17

Rh We have to consider a later time, when King and Parliament formed the centres round which were ranged the lovers of authority on one side and of liberty on the other. The two parties were not entirely homogeneous, nor could the line of demarcation between them be clearly and sharply drawn. There was so much difference between the two wings of either army, and so much sympathy between what were called the moderate sections of the two, as might be expected if their development as parties was the result of natural social growth. Falkland and Essex, although fighting in opposite camps, were nearer in sympathy to each other than the former was to Strafford or the latter to Harrison. The main lines, however, were always discernible; popular rights on one side, and personal power on the other, were arrayed in opposition. So far the party distinctions were evidently the result of the action of natural laws, of the gradual growth and development of social and intellectual germs. But the excitement of the times gave to this growth an abnormal impetus, and produced a political structure which could not find permanent nourishment either in the intelligence or the sympathies of the mass of the people. The republic was the thorough of Liberalism, which opposed itself to the autocratic thorough of the King and Strafford. Such a form of government may prove to be the natural result and outcome of the ideas of liberty and popular rights, but it was then produced out of due time, and even if the life continued, the outer form decayed. So that what was seen when the crisis passed away was a return largely to the old state of things, with this difference—that both of the naturally formed parties, that of authority and that of liberty, were considerably modified. The extreme section of absolutists, with their idea of divine right, began to die out, and the process was so continuous and rapid that, if not as a theory, at least as an element of English politics, it has become a mere rudimentary survival, an embryotic function, representing an instrument which in earlier times society was able to oppose to the dreaded evils of lawlessness and anarchy. In that direction there is no