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necessary for its working, and the ideas underlying it were destined to exercise a substantial influence both at home and in America.

His analysis of the history of England had driven him to the conviction that the country owed its troubles partly to the fact that political power did not correspond with the balance of property and partly to defects in the English parliamentary system. The existing Parliament was not truly representative of the nation, and with the vast increase that had taken place in the number of landowners a monarchic system was no longer suitable for the country. Government had to be altered so as to fit in with the changed conditions. Property in land was to be stated “at such a balance that the power can never swerve out of the hands of the many". Harrington possibly weakened his case by regarding property in land as the most worthy and influential form of wealth, but his views in this respect were so completely in accordance with those of the English governing class that they were afterwards accepted and applied, but in a manner of which he would not have approved. His exposition of the doctrine of the balance of property was intended to show that a stable government could be formed only on a republican basis, and for this reason he proposed that no person should own an estate worth more than £2000 per annum, whereas after the Restoration monarchy came to be esteemed as the principal safeguard of property against the encroachments of the landless. Political power largely depended upon property in land, and the connection of the two in the minds of Englishmen was at least partly responsible for the Whig monopoly of political office during the eighteenth century. The Anglo-Saxon race has always been conspicuous for its reverence for property, and only an Englishman could have elevated it to the dignity of a natural law. This was the work of John Locke, whose second treatise on Civil Government confirmed Englishmen in their conviction that there was a natural connection between government and property. But the idea was really inherent in the race, and Americans were as quick as Englishmen to resent attacks on property. Thus in 1771 the Assembly of Massachusetts in complaining against British taxation said that it formed "a tribute levied and extorted from those, who, if they have a property, have a right to the absolute disposal of it".

While Harrington was a democrat, he was no friend of mob-rule, and he introduced four devices to prevent government from falling under the control of the rabble. These devices consisted of the use of the ballot, indirect election, rotation, and a system of two chambers, of which one was only to debate and the other only to vote. Harrington was typically Puritan in his belief that "Government is the Empire of Laws, and not of Men". He looked on government as a piece of machinery which could be kept in good running order provided that the laws of which it was composed were shrewdly excogitated. From this type of mind sprouted the fundamental law

and the rigid constitution, which Puritanism failed to establish in England but succeeded in setting up in America. All Englishmen of the Puritan cast, however, had not the unwavering faith of Harrington that laws alone would keep government pure and wholesome; Penn, for example, realised that "governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them", but belief in legal devices and checks to prevent corruption has always been a feature of the American political creed.

All the particular contrivances advocated by Harrington had been tested. The ballot, suggested by the practice of Venice, had been experimented with in Massachusetts and Connecticut. But the secrecy which recommended it to Harrington was displeasing to Englishmen, and we learn from Oldmixon that the Pennsylvanians refused to make use of the ballot because "they were Englishmen and not bound to give their Votes in Huggermother: their Faces and their Voices should always go together". The method of indirect election was employed in Dutch and Italian cities and also in commercial and ecclesiastical corporate bodies. The "Agitators" of the New Model Army were appointed by a process of indirect election in 1647. The principle of rotation was designed to prevent magistrates from entrenching themselves in office and had been already suggested by George Wither in The Perpetual Parliament, a political poem published either in 1650 or 1653. Harrington, then, simply pressed into his service devices with which his contemporaries were familiar, but gave them an added significance by applying them on a national scale.

Chosen by the aid of these precautions against corruption, the Parliament of Oceana was to consist of a Senate and an Assembly, the Senate proposing and the Assembly resolving; for he held that an Assembly without a Senate could not be wise and that a Senate without an Assembly would not be honest. Since power could not be safely confined to any one man or one class, the Legislature, Executive, and Judiciary were to be kept apart. In common with Milton and Cromwell, Harrington pleaded for religious toleration, and he gave it a fresh importance by showing that where there was no liberty of conscience there could be no democracy.

The attempt to define the relations of England to Scotland and Ireland evidently gave Harrington much food for reflection. At one time he suggested that Scotland and Ireland should be represented in Parliament, but should be governed by Councils of State, elected from retiring Senators, with the assistance of provincial armies. Ultimately he drifted to the sound position that union based on compulsion could never be effective, and in 1659 he appealed for a "just league" which would leave Scotland and Ireland with their own laws and their own government.

It was even more difficult to decide on the treatment to be accorded

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to communities so remote from the mother country as the American settlements. Their very distance from England made it impossible for their inhabitants to enjoy the same privileges as Englishmen, and unless they were kept in a position of subordination the colonies could have no value for the parent State. "Provincial or dependent Empire", wrote Harrington, "is not to be exercised by them that have the balance of Dominion in the Province, because they would bring the Government from Provincial and Dependent to National and Independent." He recognised that imperialism, as it was understood in his day, could not be accommodated to his theory of the balance of property, and that settlers inheriting the Anglo-Saxon passion for freedom could not permanently be maintained in a subordinate status. These considerations led him to pen his prophetic warning of the dissolution of the Empire.

The remote possibility of the Oceana system of government being adopted by England vanished with the Puritan régime, but the establishment of new settlements in America furnished an admirable opportunity for testing the value of Harrington's ideas. At least two of the new settlements, Carolina and Pennsylvania, were honoured by the application of Oceana principles, and it is worth noting that all the transatlantic communities followed a practice which was implicit in the principle of the equal agrarian, by which the amount of land that one person could acquire was to be strictly limited. The adoption of this involved the doom of the English system of primogeniture, which had never been imitated by the English settlers in America, where circumstances led them to follow the rule of equal division of property among heirs.

The Carolina version of Oceana, as expounded in the "Fundamental Constitutions", distorted Harrington's ideas by giving them an anti-democratic bias. The settlers were divided into categories according to the proportion of land they owned, and the whole system was so arranged that no office could be held without a property qualification. Executive power was monopolised by the proprietors, and legislative power was divided between a Grand Council of fifty, of whom only fourteen could be said to represent the people in any way, and a Parliament, the function of which was to vote on the measures referred to it by the Council. Other recommendations of Harrington, the ballot, religious toleration, universal military training, were embodied in the Constitutions, which were to be read and sworn in every Parliament, while Harrington's suspicion of lawyers was echoed in the provision that no man might plead a cause for money. But in following the letter of Harrington's suggestions, those who drafted the "Fundamental Constitutions" departed from the spirit which had inspired their author by making no provision for the equal division of property among children and by safeguarding the integrity of estates. Every attempt, however, of the Carolina

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proprietors to induce the settlers to accept this scheme of government proved unsuccessful.

More in the line of succession to Harrington's leading thoughts was the method of application attempted by William Penn. This great Quaker had probably a hand in drafting the schemes of government for the Jerseys, where principles suggestive of Oceana were incorporated in the constitutions of 1676 and 1683, but it was in his own colony of Pennsylvania that he had the greatest opportunity of testing his most cherished ideas. His "Holy Experiment" savours too strongly of Harrington's devices not to have been influenced by him. The Legislature consisted of a provincial council of 72 and an Assembly of 200. The principle of rotation was applied to the former, one-third of the council being elected annually, and its function was to propose measures on which the Assembly was to vote. In the choice of the Assembly a process of indirect election and the ballot were employed. The importance of land was shown in the requirement that only landowners could share in the government of the colony, but the constitution was much more democratic than that of Carolina. Nevertheless this democratic version of Oceana was no more successful than the Carolina variation. The ballot was objected to, the Assembly refused to confine itself to the function of voting, and by 1701 it had established its right to debate and initiate legislation.

The direct influence of Harrington in America ceased with the reign of Charles II. During the revolutionary period he hardly attained the status of even a minor prophet of insurrection, but when the fighting was over and the Americans were confronted with the task of framing constitutions for themselves, he once more exercised some influence through the medium of John Adams, who had a share in the drafting of several State constitutions. The principle of a property qualification and the system of checks and balances, with which the name of Harrington is associated, are particularly conspicuous in the constitution of Massachusetts, where the influence of Adams naturally counted for most.

So many of the devices with which Harrington has made us familiar have been incorporated in the constitution of the United States that it would be easy to exaggerate his influence. The explanation is to be found in the fact that his writings have presented us with the most comprehensive exposition of Puritan political thought in the first half of the seventeenth century, so that many of the features of the American constitution are to be attributed rather to the general influence of Puritanism than to the particular championship of Harrington. The written constitution, for example, was a commonplace of Puritan thought. But the notion of a fixed law was one with which few Englishmen of the seventeenth century would have quarrelled; for the concept had been created by the need of repelling the pretences of the Divine Right theory of monarchy. Magna Carta,

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in particular, stood upon a pinnacle which could not be reached by the will of any ruler. "In every government", said Cromwell, "there must be somewhat fundamental, somewhat like a Magna Carta, that should be standing and be unalterable." The Puritans, as the opponents of the Crown in the great constitutional quarrel of the century, inevitably became the principal champions of the idea of a fundamental law which they carried over to America.

The other practices of America which suggest the influence of Harrington are the ballot, indirect election, the multiplication of offices and the principle that they should be held only for a limited period, rotation, the use of petitions, the separation of powers, the popular ratification of constitutional legislation, and the employment of special machinery for assuring the preservation of the constitution. Popular education, the spread of which has been honourably associated with Puritanism, also found a niche in his thesis, while the doctrine of religious freedom, if not inherent in Puritanism, was assuredly advanced by the championship which it received from writers like Milton and Harrington. The device of the referendum, too, which is employed in America, was implicit in the Oceana, for in Valerius and Publicola (1659) the author describes his Assembly as "nothing else but an Instrument or Method whereby to receive the Result of the whole Nation with order and expedition, and without any manner of tumult and confusion". The doctrine of the separation of powers, which forms a cardinal point in the Oceana system of government, has received its fullest application in America; but though the idea dates back to the period of the Commonwealth, it was through Montesquieu that it exerted its most constructive influence on American thought.

The fundamental reason why Puritanism lost its hold on England was that it was associated with elements hostile to the national tradition. This is exemplified even in the case of Harrington, although he stands apart from his contemporaries by the fact that he made no use of the social compact as a peg on which to hang his theories but appealed to experience. Yet the recourse to history, unillumined by the notion of continuity, led him to introduce into his scheme of government a hotch-potch of foreign elements, and he missed the point of Dr Gauden's criticism that "Models of new government heal not, Government must fit the genius of a people". This was the true lesson of history, and the failure to read it aright was the cause of the downfall of the Puritans.

Against the mounting sentiment in favour of monarchic government the despairing vehemence of John Milton spent itself in vain. The proposals set forth in his pamphlet, The Ready and Easy Way to establish a Free Commonwealth (1659), were hardly of the nature to win 1 Carlyle, T., Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell (ed. Lomas), Speech III, п, 382. 2 Kaкоuрyo sive Medicastri: slight healers of publique hurts (Brit. Mus., E. 1019).