Page:The parallel between the English and American civil wars.djvu/14

THE ENGLISH AND AMERICAN the quarrel to its real causes. In both countries, directly or indirectly, the struggle was a struggle for the maintenance of a free government, but in England the problem took the simplest and most elementary form. The question was, whether the will of one man should determine the destinies of a whole people. So at least the leaders of the republicans asserted, seeing more clearly than other men what the real issue would become. "I do not think," said Harry Marten to Mr Hyde, "one man wise enough to govern us all," a word, says Hyde, "which would at the time have been abhorred by the whole nation." "The question in dispute between the King's party and us," said Ludlow, "was as I apprehended, whether the King should govern as a God by his will, and the nation be governed by force like beasts, or whether the people should be governed by laws made by themselves, and live under a government derived from their own consent ." 6