Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 12, No. 2, March 16th, 1949.

Result?

Result?

But no. It suits the guardians of the status quo three centuries later to distort the facts in an attempt to prove that the general progress of our constitution has been peaceable, and that such bloody outbursts as 1649 were unfortunate accidents, to be at all cost deplored. Why, heavens above, if we acknowledge the historical correctness of executing Charles the First, who knows but we might not end by having the acknowledge the historical correctness of executing Petkov?

Accordingly the civil strife must be proved to have got us nowhere. The restoration of 1660 took us back, they argue, to 1640. But did it? Historically. 1660 consolidated the gains of the Revolution. It cannot be denied that although some of the political superstructure was later nominally restored, the Revolution did materially advance the progress of the British nation, in liberating the Forces of the middle class from the chains that were stifling their growth. Speaking of the French September massacres, victor Hugo wrote: "Yes the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are ended, this fact is recognised; the human race has been harshly used, but it has moved onward."

It matter not that Hampden. Fairfax and Cromwell may have been thinking of personal rather than public advancement, for historical progress was at that stage bound up with "the personal advancement of individual bourgeois.