Commoner

“ GONZALO. I' th' commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things; for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate; Letters should not be known; riches, poverty, And use of service, none; contract, succession, Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none; No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil; No occupation; all men idle, all; And women too, but innocent and pure; No sovereignty- SEBASTIAN. Yet he would be king on't. ANTONIO. The latter end of his commonwealth forgets the beginning. GONZALO. All things in common nature should produce Without sweat or endeavour. ”

“ Tell citizens that they need to become citizens of this kingdom, that the commonwealth on earth may be the image and the vestibule of the commonwealth of the skies. Tell classes that they need the instructions of this Master, that society may be less a den of selfish contentions, and more a field of gracious ministries and ennobling toils. Tell commerce that she needs the inspiration of this duty, that the dull, the common, the base may be transfigured and wear the forms of beauty, nobleness, and truth. ”

“ I believe in our commonwealth, yet young, and in the process of making, palpitant with energy and faring forth with high hope and swift step; and I covenant with the God of my fathers to give myself in service, mind and money, hand and heart, to explore and develop her physical, intellectual and moral resources, to sing her praises truthfully, to keep her politics pure, her ideals high, and to make better and better her schools and churches, her lands and homes, and to make her in fact what she is by divine right, the queen of all the commonwealths. ”

“ And this is the form of a society characterized by status—a society, the members of which stand one toward another in successive grades of subordination. From the despot down to the slave, all are masters of those below and subjects of those above. The relation of the child to the father, of the father to some superior, and so on up to the absolute head, is one in which the individual of lower status is at the mercy of one of higher status. ”

“ By commonwealth, I must be understood all along to mean, not a democracy, or any form of government, but any independent community, which the Latines signified by the word civitas, to which the word which best answers in our language, is commonwealth, and most properly expresses such a society of men, which community or city in English does not; for there may be subordinate communities in a government ”

“ Observe this whole world arranged in the same human commonwealth, with what administrations, with what orderly degrees of authority, with what conditions of citizenship, with what laws, manners, arts! ”

“ As it is, in the modern sense, its raison d'etre is the harmonious blending of all classes of society; the preservation of the essential interests, wisely understood, of the people; the preservation of an open field for the exercise of every virtue and every talent, and, subject to these, the performance of every duty enjoined by good neighbourhood, and the encouragement of every tendency and impulse which points to the amelioration of mankind, at home or abroad. Such is the idea of a commonwealth, constructed on true, liberal principles, and sanctified by Christianity. ”

“ I purpose, in the few minutes allotted to me, to discover, if possible, the true sphere of the state in reference to the education of the young. I shall use the word state in its broadest sense—a community of persons living within a limited territory and bound together by political ties. If such a community has a right to exist, then it has a right to do anything that is necessary to maintain that existence—to appropriate private property and even to take life itself. ”

“ In other words, as I use the term community, one of the autonomic groups into which the race is divided is intended; and as I use the term state, the governing entity of such a group is intended. By individual ideals, as I shall use that term, the opinions an individual forms as to what he should do or omit to promote his own welfare and that of the human race is intended; and by community ideals, the opinions a community forms as to what it should do to promote its welfare and that of the individuals of whom it is composed. ”

“ And whereas in other States members of the same government regard one of their colleagues as a friend and another as an enemy, in our State no man is a stranger to another; for every citizen is connected with every other by ties of blood, and these names and this way of speaking will have a corresponding reality—brother, father, sister, mother, repeated from infancy in the ears of children, will not be mere words. 464Then again the citizens will have all things in common, in having common property they will have common pleasures and pains. ”

“ I call then this commonwealth pre-eminently and emphatically Human Society, and its intellect the Human Mind, and its decisions the sense of mankind, and its disciplined and cultivated state Civilization in the abstract, and the territory on which it lies the orbis terrarum, or the World. ”

“ With the name, you have taken the general system of organization of society, within a society, held together by one bond. That bond, as existing in the TOTEMIC tie, reaches, with a peculiar force, each [5] individual, in such society. It is an idea noble in itself, and worthy of the thought and care, by which it has been nurtured and moulded into its present auspicious form.—The union you thus form, is a union of minds. It is a band of brotherhood, but a brotherhood of letters. It is a confederacy of tribes, but a literary confederacy. ”

“ In this respect, I cannot compare the soul more properly to any thing than to a republic or commonwealth, in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts. ”

“ This is a commonwealth of the fabric that has an open ear and a public concern; she is not made for herself only, but given as a magistrate of God to mankind, for the vindication of common right and the law of nature. ”

“ And have not I, more than once, heard your Majesty express the wish and the hope for “a community on earth in which all the members should have equal opportunity for the attainment of virtue, knowledge, a life of activity and prosperity: a community in which goodness and capacity should constitute the highest aristocracy, and in which the highest rank should depend upon the highest human worth?” ”

“ The great founder of a commonwealth was first a gentleman, from Moses downwards; though, he says, “there be great divines, poets, lawyers, great men in all professions, the genius of a great politician is peculiar to the genius of a gentleman.” And further, “An army may as well consist of soldiers without officers, or of officers without soldiers, as a commonwealth (especially such an one as is capable of greatness) consist of a people without gentry, or of a gentry without a people.” ”

“ Can any one doubt that such a state of society in which the greatest knowledge of its interests was thus combined with the greatest sympathy with its wants, would realize the idea of a perfect Commonwealth? ”

“ Our little society was a commonwealth of the most democratic description—and, as usually happens in these sort of experiments, there was a community of goods that were good for nothing to the community. ”

“ Let us now take the two leading products of human association, the Family and the State. What constitutes the State other than the sentiment of obedience by which a multitude of men collect together under the authority of a chief? ”

“ Nor could those who founded our commonwealth have been moved as they were, or achieved the happy success they did, had it not been for their clear, profound, and practical acknowledgment of the being and government of that good and almighty One who fills immensity and eternity, and from whom, and by whom, and to whom are all things. ”

“ The duties imposed on each man in regard to the particular society of which he is a member, are called civil duties. He, himself, in regard to this society, is what is called a citizen; finally, the society itself, considered as one and the same person, of which the citizens are the members, is what is called the State or the city. ”

“ In this strange and splendid degree it cannot be expected, perhaps, to pervade a whole commonwealth or a whole civilization; but one commonwealth may have it much more than another commonwealth, one civilization much more than another civilization. ”

“ My lords, at this awful close, in the name of the Commons and surrounded by them, I attest the retiring, I attest the advancing generations, between which, as a link in the great chain of eternal order, we stand. We call this nation, we call the world to witness, that the Commons have shrunk from no labor ”

“ The foremost duty, therefore, of the rulers of the State should be to make sure that the laws and institutions, the general character and administration of the commonwealth, shall be such as of themselves to realize public well-being and private prosperity. ”

“ The Customs, Manners, and Habits of the People, do, as I have said, form one Part of the Political Constitution; if these are altered therefore, this must be changed likewise; and here, as in the Natural Body, the Disorder of any Part will, in its Consequence, affect the whole.
One known Division of the People in this Nation is into the Nobility, the Gentry, and the Commonalty. ”

“ There must be unity of hands, and of hearts too, that the Republic may be elevated to the sublime idea of a true commonwealth, which we are told “ought to be but as one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth and stature of an honest man, as big and compact in virtue as in body.” ”

“ It is solely on the basis of this common interest that every society should be governed. ”

“ The human city or community of men is the highest point which this moral philosophy contemplates. Each particular commonwealth should be herein the image of the one universal commonwealth which their thought had constructed. But what, then, is the relation of the individual man to the whole of which he is a part? This nature, which is the standard to the whole ideal commonwealth, is, as we have seen so often, in fact a law of the strictest necessity. If virtuous, man follows it willingly; if vicious, he must follow it against his will. ”

“ Every people, therefore, which consists of such an association of the entire multitude as I have described, every city which consists of an assemblage of the people, and every commonwealth which embraces every member of these associations, must be regulated by a certain authority, in order to be permanent. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The reminiscences of the pioneers from the history of the first life breathings of our commonwealth—of a commonwealth which, though in its infancy, is grand indeed, and which gives promise of attaining greatness in the full maturity of its powers of which those who laid the foundations of the state scarcely dreamed. The pioneers are the fathers of the commonwealth ”

“ The first part inculcates the doctrine that society is a compact made by man with man for the good of the commonwealth; that the forms of government are diverse, and therefore are by God 431 and nature left to the choice of the people; that kings do not derive their title from any birthright, or lineal descent, but from their coronation, with conditions and admissions by the consent of the people ”

“ We have now seen, gentlemen, two periods of the world, each of which is dominated by the ruling idea of a particular class of the community which impresses its own principle on all the social arrangements of its time. ”

“ If law, then are we fellow-citizens. If so, then are we partners in some one commonweal. If so, then the world is as it were a city. For which other commonweal is it, that all men can be said to be members of? ”

“ He notices how important such just definitions are in all debates whatever, and draws this conclusion from the preceding arguments—that the Commonwealth is the common welfare whenever it is swayed with justice and wisdom, whether it be subordinated to a king, an aristocracy, or a democracy. ”

“ In starting this little Co-operative Commonwealth, I am reminded by those who are always at a man's elbow to fill him with forebodings of ill, to look at the failures, which I have just referred to, which make up the history of the attempt to realise ideal commonwealths in this practical workaday world. ”

“ The increase of the commonwealth, and of their own valour was owing to this; and all those virtues that usually adorn the great, as integrity, honour, and munificence, flourishing a long time in them, raised them and their posterity to the empire of the whole world. ”

“ It is interwoven with the very constitution of human society. Wherefore the noble faculty of speech, the high prerogative of reason, the sweet flow of domestic sympathies, and the congregation of men in communities, with statutes and civil compacts, and distinctions of rank and office? All these indicate your duty to the human brotherhood ”

“ All societies—the society called the family as well as that called the state—exist, not for their own sake, but for the sake of men, for the purpose of enabling each individual composing them to attain certain great aims and great benefits. ”

“ The ancient commonwealths thought themselves entitled to practise, and the ancient philosophers countenanced, the regulation of every part of private conduct by public authority, on the ground that the State had a deep interest in the whole bodily and mental discipline of every one of its citizens ”

“ The man’s duty as a member of a commonwealth, is to assist in the maintenance, in the advance, in the defence of the state. The woman’s duty, as a member of the commonwealth, is to assist in the ordering, in the comforting, and in the beautiful adornment of the state. ”