370 Reviews of Books writers in his field, conclusions which it was certainly proper to notice. "Later histories", he says (p. vii), "... I have not read, or only looked at after my pages were composed." We believe it would have been to the advantage of his book if more attention had been paid to the work of fellow-workers. Mr. Ireland makes no reference to certain ideas of American students as to the English Commonwealth and the proper place of Vane in history. American scholars believe that in a curious way a reaction was felt in Old England from New England, even though the colonies of Brad- ford and Winthrop were so distant and feeble. It was particularly from John Cotton, the great minister of Boston, that a powerful influence went back across the ocean. Owen, Goodwin, and Nye, the ministerial lead- ers of the Independents in England, professed to have gained their ideas from Cotton's " Keyes " and " Way of the Churches " ; while of the secular leaders, Cromwell was Cotton's warm friend and correspondent, and Vane, as has been said, was " trained in Cotton's study " during the time when, scarcely beyond boyhood, he played a part in Massachusetts. Hugh Peters, too, and Roger Williams, men who had been shaped in the New England environment, were in Old England affairs factors of con- sequence. Independency was often at the time called " the New England vv-ay ". If American students of the period are correct, momentous in- deed was the influence that went back to the Old World from Massa- chusetts Bay ; the English Commonwealth was a mighty and noble mani- festation. It came prematurely and apparently failed, but only apparently, for, as John Richard Green has said, " For the last two hundred years England has been doing little more than carrying out in a slow and tentative way the scheme of political and religious reform which the army [the Independents] propounded at the close of the Civil War" (Short History, ed. 1875, p. 548). Since popular government, long the possession of America, grows apace also in England, the line of separation between the two great English-speaking bodies tends to fade out, and the " Anglo-Saxon schism " may perhaps at last be healed — a consummation devoutly to be wished, of which Vane, perhaps more than any other historic figure, is the type and prophet. C. W. Upham declared, two generations ago. that the " name [of young Sir Henry Vane is] the most appropriate link to bind us to the land of our fathers" (Life, ed. 1835, p. 99). He pos- sesses perhaps the ui^ique distinction of having had an eminent political career both in America and in England ; and his career in England became an effort to establish American ideas, Abraham Lincoln's gov- ernment of, by, and for the people. For that he strove long after even Cromwell became discouraged in his republicanism, and for that at last he laid his head upon the block. In his leading position in the English Commonwealth, as a strenuous champion of liberty in Richard's Parlia- ment, and in the chaos which immediately preceded the Restoration, Vane may well be described as an American Englishman.
