But to dig up the dead Cromwell and Ireton, to suspend them upon the gallows, to mark out John Milton, old and blind, for poverty and contempt, was both safe and pleasant.  And civilization was guarded accordingly.  One little bit of comfort, however, was permitted.  Scotland had been the Virginia of his day, and Charles had the satisfaction of hearing that the Whigs, who had betrayed and sold his father, and who had (a far worse offence) made himself listen to three-hours’ sermons, were chased like wild beasts among the hills, after the defeat of Bothwell Brigg.  But what Charles could not do was permitted to his brother.  After the rebellion of Monmouth was put down, the West of England was turned to mourning.  From the princely bastard who sued in agony and vain humiliation, to the clown of Devon forced into the rebel ranks,—­from the peer who plotted, to the venerable and Christian woman whose sole crime was sheltering the houseless and starving fugitive, there was given to the vanquished no mercy but the mercy of Jeffreys, no tenderness but the tenderness of Kirk.

But the House of Stuart was not always to represent the side of victory.  Thirty years after the Rout of Sedgemoor, the son of James, whose name was clouded by rumor with the same stain of spuriousness as that of his unfortunate cousin, was proclaimed by the Earl of Mar.  The Jacobites were forced to drink to the dregs the cup of bitterness they had so gladly administered to others.  Over Temple Bar and London Bridge the heads of the defeated rebels bore witness to the guardianship of civilization as understood in the eighteenth century.

Another thirty years brings us to the landing of Moidart, the rising of the clans, the fall of Edinburgh and Carlisle, the “Bull’s Run” at Prestonpans, and the panic of London.  If we are anxious to guard our civilization according to Hanoverian precedents, there is one name commonly given to the Commander-in-chief at Culloden which Congress should add to the titles it is preparing against McClellan’s successful advance.  The “Butcher Cumberland” not only hounded on his troops with the tempting price of thirty thousand pounds for the Pretender dead or alive, but every adherent of the luckless Jefferson Davis of that day was in peril of life and wholesale confiscation.  The House of Hanover not only broke the backbone of the Rebellion, but mangled without mercy its remains.

We come now, in another thirty years, to the next struggle of England with a portion of her people.  It is impossible, as well as unfair, to say what might have been done with “Mr. Washington, the Virginia colonel,” and Mr. Franklin, the Philadelphia printer, had they not been able to determine their own destiny.  We can only surmise, by referring to two well-known localities in New York, the “Old Sugar-House” and the “Jersey Prison-Ship,” how paternally George III was disposed then to resume his rights.  And without disposition to press historic parallels, we cannot but compare Arnold and Tryon’s raid along the south shore of Connecticut with a certain sail recently made up the Tennessee River to the foot of the Muscle Shoals by the command of a modern Connecticut officer.