The Poole Telegram. — 1880-03-19 (Poole, Dorset, England)

OLIVER CROMWELL. A good son, a good husband, A good father, A good citivn. a good ruler, Both in war and peace, Was born in this town. To know his public acts Open the History of England. Where it exhibits in few pages (Alas too few) The title of commonwealth. Then, again, we have John Milton, the Homer of Britain, the accomplished Latin secretary, and the immortal author of "Paradise Lost," John Hampden, the scholar, soldier, gentleman, and Christian. Algernon Sidney, a name to be venerated as long as men love liberty without license and patriotism above price. Andrew Marvell, "The Incorruptible," who refused a present of a thousand pounds from Charles IL, though at that very moment he was obliged to borrow a guinea from a friend. James Harrington, the gentle author of the once famous " Oceana," John Pym, the sturdy old Puritan, ever foremost in opposing the arbitrary measures of the crown, and whom the infatuated Charles demanded to be given up to him by the House of Commons, and Lord William Russell, the "martyr for liberty," who, by the aid of perjured witnesses and a packed jury, was judicially murdered. These are a few of the great radicals who conspicuously figured in what may be termed the only radical epoch in our history—the only break in "the long Royal Family chain," and at what other period of our history can we find names more illustrious? Don't imagine that our stern " puritan " forefathers were the easilyexcitable and ignorantly-fanatical lot of regicides which they were represented to be by the sycophants of the restoration. No such thing. They were then what Mr. Gladstone has defined radicals now to be—" men in earnest." They were men in earnest not for themselves but for the commonweal. They were men who thought and acted, who thought of the irretrievable calamities likely to befall the country, by the gradual but determined deprivation of the rights and privileges of the subject in the acknowledgement of an authority as absurb as it was despotic. They acted when action became imperatively necessary, and when every other form of protest had been ignominiously spurned. They brought the obstinate Charles, a man of many virtues, but spoilt by the pig-headed stupidity of his race, te the block, and in after years the same stupidity caused his descendaats to be driven into exile and for ever from the throne. Desperate diseases require, it is said, desperate remedies, and this doubtless was one of them. My Radicalism, however, is not quite so advanced as of the youth of Lord Beaconsfield, otherwise I might agree with him that the hand is blessed that slays a tyrant king, or, to use his own words in his " Revolutionary epick," published in 1834  "And blesse be the hand that dares to wave The reAicidal steel that shall redeem A nation's sorrow with a tyrant's blood."  These "puritans" were the stock from which the Nonconformity of to-day has sprung. They were the men who rather than comply with the requirements of the disgraceful Uniformity Act of 1662, and violate their consciences in subscribing to many things which they regarded as contrary to the Word of God, were to the number of more than two thousand ejected from their livings. Tht re is a sublimity in this which will inspire men for generations yet unborn. Whenever we talk of sacrifices for principle, of braving poverty, privation, and death, rather than be false to conscience, let us reverently remember this fact, and that it was a State Church which perpetrated the iniquity. Little however did it dream of the strength of the implacable foe its injustice had created. It saw its error when. too late, and in the inevitable consequence—the rapidly growing demand for religious liberty and !quality,. will be found its destruction as a St Ite establishment, and the day of its judgment cannot much longer be, averted.