the war he had identified himself with the attainment of its one grand popular object. From performing this supreme service he was prevented by defects of temper which he condemned in Cromwell, a hero whom he admired and in some respects strikingly resembled. Cromwell's desire, he says,
was to remedy specific evils. He was too impatient to found the kind of legal and constitutional system which would prevent the recurrence of such evils. Cromwell's extreme admirers treat his impatience of the delays and shortcoming of ordinary constitutional and legal proceedings as a sign of his greatness. It was just the reverse. . . . His strength, his intensity of conviction, his delight in exercising powers for what he conceived to be good ends; his dislike for speculative reforms and his inability to appreciate the necessity of theories to a practical man who wishes to do good work . . . all these tendencies worked together to unfit him for the task of helping a liberty-loving people on the road to freedom.
