THE ENGLISH AND AMERICAN
speedily be cut off out of the land." We find him telling Fairfax that all his officers express "a very great zeal to have impartial justice done upon offenders," and that he himself is persuaded that this is a thing "which God puts into our hearts[1]."
It was not that Cromwell and his officers were by nature more bloodthirsty than Grant and his officers. The difference in their tempers was due to the difference in their ideas. The English people of the seventeenth century were behind the Americans not only in their political but in their religious education. Perhaps there was too much of the old Adam in the Oomwellian officers, certainly there was too much of the Old Testament. They were full of horrid texts about punishment and expiation. One of their favourites was Numbers xxxv. 33. Ludlow quotes it as his reason for approving the death of the king. "I was convinced by the express words of God's law that 'blood defileth a
- ↑ Nicolay and Hay, x. 203; Putnam, Abraham Lincoln, p. 187; Carlyle's Cromwell, Letters 64, 83.
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