English Commonwealth

“ It was small wonder that the English people so soon came to regard the Commonwealth as a not utterly unmitigated blessing. The promised millennium grew to be unsatisfactory to all but the very elect; and outside that pale, the desire for the King to have his own again was to spread fast and wide. ”

“ When the motion for the abolition of the house of lords, as ‘useless and dangerous,’ was being discussed, he proposed to substitute the words ‘useless but not dangerous.’ On another occasion, it is said, in drawing up a republican document, he spoke of ‘England being restored to its ancient government of commonwealth,’ and in answer to an objection that a commonwealth never before existed in England, quoted a text which had always puzzled him, where a man blind from his birth was said to be ‘restored’ to the sight he should have had. ”

“ What with us is lacking is the whole class which in England carries on politics, the class of gentlemen who are well-to-do and therefore Conservative, who are independent of material interests and whose whole education is directed towards making them English statesmen, and the object of whose life is to take part in the Commonwealth of England. ”

“ Now seeing it is manifest, that the civil power, and the power of the commonwealth is the same thing; and that supremacy, and the power of making canons, and granting faculties, implieth a commonwealth; it followeth, that where one is sovereign, another supreme; where one can make laws, and another make canons; there must needs be two commonwealths, of one and the same subjects; which is a kingdom divided in itself, and cannot stand. ”

“ The difference of commonwealths, consisteth in the difference of the sovereign, or the person representative of all and every one of the multitude. And because the sovereignty is either in one man, or in an assembly of more than one; and into that assembly either every man hath right to enter, or not every one, but certain men distinguished from the rest; it is manifest, there can be but three kinds of commonwealth. ”

“ The Parliament of 1661.
The new House of Commons was made up for the most part of young men, of men, that is, who had but a faint memory of the Stuart tyranny under which their childhood had been spent, but who had a keen memory of living from manhood beneath the tyranny of the Commonwealth. They had seen their fathers driven from the justice-bench, driven from the polling-booth, half-beggared and imprisoned for no other cause but their loyalty to the king. ”

“ And for such a restoration the vast majority of the nation were longing more and more. The old enmities of party and sect were forgotten in the common enmity of every party and every sect to the tyranny of the sword. A new national unity was revealing itself, as one jarring element after another came in to swell the mass of the national opposition to the system of the Protectorate. The moderate Royalist joined hands with the Cavalier, the steady Presbyterian came to join the moderate Royalist, and their ranks were swelled at last by the very founders of the Commonwealth. ”

“ Because other Nations as yet own Monarchy, and will buy and sell, therefore it is convenient for the peace of our Commonwealth, that our ships do transport our English goods and exchange for theirs, and conform to the customs of other Nations in buying and selling: Always provided that what goods our ships carry out, they shall be the Commonwealth’s goods; and all their trading with other Nations shall be upon the Common Stock, to enrich the Storehouses. ”

“ And when a colony is settled, they are either a commonwealth of themselves, discharged of their subjection to their sovereign that sent them, as hath been done by many commonwealths, of ancient time, in which 240case the commonwealth from which they went, was called their metropolis or mother, and requires no more of them, than fathers require of the children, whom they emancipate and make free from their domestic government, which is honour, and friendship ”

“ For a fundamental law in every commonwealth is that, which being taken away, the commonwealth faileth, and is utterly dissolved; as a building whose foundation is destroyed. And therefore a fundamental law is that, by which subjects are bound to uphold whatsoever power is given to the 276sovereign, whether a monarch, or a sovereign assembly, without which the commonwealth cannot stand; such as is the power of war and peace, of judicature, of election of officers, and of doing whatsoever he shall think necessary for the public good. ”

“ His most effective reports were those which laid stress upon the failure of the colony to obey the navigation acts and the royal commands, and upon its use of the word "Commonwealth," as if the corporation were already an independent state. These reports were accepted by the English authorities as correct statements of fact, for they seemed to be confirmed by the [Pg 156] evidence of London merchants and by at least one West Indian governor, who knew the colony and had no personal interests at stake. ”

“ There were the workshops in which the political creed of England was fashioned, where the notion of a free commonwealth with the three estates of king, lords, and commons holding by common consent their several authority, was proved and tested till it became the mere commonplace, the vulgar property of every Englishman. ”

“ This is the Palladium of our government, which cannot be stolen as their’s was from Troy; for the keepers of it are too many to be killed, because every Englishman has an interest in it: for which reason neither can it be bought and sold, so as to make a title; and a man of a moderate understanding may easily undertake that it shall never be preached away from us. And hereby England is rendered the noblest commonwealth and kingdom in the world. I name commonwealth first, because K. James I. in one of his speeches to the parliament, says, “I am the great servant of the commonwealth.” ”

“ But their greatest achievement, I suggest, is the Commonwealth itself, and that owes much to all of them. Thus formed, the Commonwealth bears no resemblance to the Empires of the past. It is an entirely new conception, built on the highest qualities of the spirit of man: friendship, loyalty and the desire for freedom and peace. ”

“ A true Whig is not afraid of the Name of a Commonwealthsman, because so many foolish People, who know not what it means, run it down: The Anarchy and Confusion which these Nations fell into near Sixty Years ago, and which was falsly called a Commonwealth, frightning them out of the true Construction of the Word. But Queen Elizabeth, and many other of our best Princes, were not scrupulous of calling our Government a Commonwealth, even in their solemn Speeches to Parliament. ”

“ As a former antagonist of those who are now its comrades in arms, General Smuts can criticize the British commonwealth—as he calls it in preference to empire—with something of detachment. ... Throughout his speeches he stresses the fact that Great Britain is a congeries of separate nations. He says the federal principle, as elaborated by us for instance, cannot work. Liberty and complete local sovereignty can alone hold the commonwealth together. ”

“ To act thus is indeed to perfect the union and make all the inhabitants of Great Britain acknowledge, with gratitude and with joy, that they are subjects of the same well-regulated kingdom, and governed with the same impartial affection by the sovereign and father of the whole commonwealth. ”

“ They believed it to be still in their power to regenerate England. The House of Commons declared England to be a Commonwealth, 'without a king or House of Lords,' and, taking the name of Parliament for itself, appointed forty-one persons to be a Council of State, charged with the executive government, and renewed annually. ”

“ The British constitution in theory and in the present administration of it in general comes nearest the idea of perfection of any that has been reduced to practice; and if the principles of it are adhered to it will, according to the infallible prediction of Harrington, always keep the Britons uppermost in Europe till their only rival nation shall either embrace that perfect model of a commonwealth given us by that author or come as near it as Great Britain is. ”

“ A true republic exists only where the questions of government are fairly and honorably submitted to the whole population, with a universal disposition to acquiesce peaceably in the decision of the majority, when that is ascertained. There probably has never been any such state of things as this in any country of Europe since the Christian era. There certainly was no such state of things in England in the time of the Commonwealth. ”

“ The Parliament bent before the iron will of the people's champion, and from the Captain of a troop and the General of an army the determined farmer of the fens took the helm and steered his country through reefs and breakers, until, under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, the commonwealth of England became the first power in Europe, unconquerable on the land, invincible on the sea. ”

“ They enacted also an engagement to be taken by every man, in these words: You shall promise to be true and faithful to the Commonwealth of England, as it is now established, without King or House of Lords. ”

“ And this we have done that all the inhabitants of the collonie may live quietly and securely under the commonwealth of England. And we do promise that the parliament and commonwealth of England shall confirm and make good all those transactions of ours. ”

“ I believe in the New England principles, and in the men who sought New England’s shores, not to find gold, to speculate in land, to buy bonanza farms, but to found a commonwealth such as mankind had never seen, a commonwealth whose corner-stones should be righteousness and ideas. ”

“ It then became evident that a new power had entered the House of Commons. From that date the nation has fully realized that although England is a monarchy in name, yet it is a republic in fact. The slow progress of time has at length given to the British people— English, Scotch, Welsh, and Irish—the great gift of practical liberty ”

“ Therefore, by these several and distinct communities alone, all our primitive governments must have been, and in point of fact were, ordained and established; and governments being so established, these several communities, their respective authors, thereby assumed to be, and so far as they were severally concerned, became, that great moral and accountable being, a sovereign State, which, having chosen the Democratic form for its government, was known and styled the Commonwealth. ”

“ England was the first western country to attain political unity with a territory substantially the same as at the present day; and the determination of the English kings that in the more important matters justice should be done throughout the land in the king's name, either by his courts at Westminster or by judges sent by him to the counties, secured the formation of an English Common Law which left comparatively little play for local custom, and which at an early time became strong enough to resist attempts to introduce foreign law. ”

“ All these nations have helped to create our Commonwealth, and all are equally concerned to maintain, develop and defend it against any challenge that may come.
As I travel across the world today I am ever more deeply impressed with the achievement and the opportunity which the modern Commonwealth presents.
Like New Zealand, from whose North Island I am speaking, every one of its nations can be justly proud of what it has built for itself on its own soil. ”

“ Whatever were the circumstances to which it was attributable, the foreign element in the commonwealth determined the whole course of its history, which, at all its stages, is little more than a narrative of conflicts between a stubborn nationality and an alien population. ”

“ Common ideals and hopes, not formal bonds, unite the members of the Commonwealth and promote that association between them which, in my belief, has contributed significantly to the cause of human freedom. ”

“ The rest politically to be put into a commonwealth, first distributed among all the towns in England in sums according to the quantity and number of the occupiers and where most need is, and all the towns to be bound to the king so that he may have the money at his extreme need to serve him, he rendering it again. ”

“ There is, at any rate, a more "full and frequent" Parliament than before: and there has been no declaration hitherto of any intention to subvert the Commonwealth. On the contrary, had not Monk, both in his speech to the Secluded Members before readmitting them, and also in his Declaration or Address to the Army published after their re-admission, used the language of a true Commonwealth's-man, and even called God to witness that his only aim was "God's glory and the settlement of these nations upon Commonwealth foundations"? ”

“ It is to the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth alone that, through the Imperial Government, they must look, for remedy or relief for any action affecting them done within the bounds of the Commonwealth, whether it is the act of a private individual, of a State official, or of a State government. The Commonwealth is, through His Majesty’s Government, just as responsible for any action of South Australia affecting an external community as the United States of America are for the action of Louisiana or any other State of the Union. ”

“ He first summarises their function as a whole, and of the special duty incumbent on all public officials, as follows:
“All the Offices in a Commonwealth are like links of a chain; they arise from one and the same root, which is necessity of Common Peace; therefore they are to assist each other, and all others are to assist them, as need requires, upon pain of punishment by the breach of the Laws. The Rule of Right Government being thus observed, may make a whole Land, nay the whole Fabric of the Earth, to become one Family of Mankind, and one well-governed Commonwealth.” ”