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Oceana

by James Harrington

INTRODUCTION TO OCEANA

JAMES HARRINGTON, eldest son of Sir Sapcotes Harrington of
Exton, in Rutlandshire, was born in the reign of James I, in
January, 1661, five years before the death of Shakespeare. He was
two or three years younger than John Milton. His great-grandfather
was Sir James Harrington, who married Lucy, daughter of Sir
William Sidney, lived with her to their golden wedding-day, and
had eighteen children, through whom he counted himself, before
his death, patriarch in a family that in his own time produced eight
dukes, three marquises, seventy earls, twenty-seven viscounts, and
thirty-six barons, sixteen of them all being Knights of the Garter.
James Harrington's ideal of a commonwealth was the design,
therefore, of a man in many ways connected with the chief nobility
of England.

Sir Sapcotes Harrington married twice, and had by each of his
wives two sons and two daughters. James Harrington was eldest
son by the first marriage, which was to Jane, daughter of Sir
William Samuel of Upton, in Northamptonshire. James
Harrington's brother became a merchant; of his half-brothers, one
went to sea, the other became a captain in the army.

As a child, James Harrington was studious, and so sedate that it
was said playfully of him he rather kept his parents and teachers in
awe than needed correction; but in after-life his quick wit made
him full of playfulness in conversation. In 1629 he entered Trinity
College, Oxford, as a gentleman commoner. There he had for tutor
William Chillingworth, a Fellow of the college, who after
conversion to the Church of Rome had reasoned his way back into
Protestant opinions. Chillingworth became a famous champion of
Protestantism in the question between the Churches, although
many Protestants attacked him as unsound because he would not
accept the Athanasian Creed and had some other reservations.

Harrington prepared himself for foreign travel by study of modern
languages, but before he went abroad, and while he was still under
age, his father died and he succeeded to his patrimony. The
socage tenure of his estate gave him free choice of his own
guardian, and he chose his mother's mother, Lady Samuel.

He then began the season of travel which usually followed studies
at the university, a part of his training to which he had looked
forward with especial interest. He went first to Holland, which
had been in Queen Elizabeth's time the battle-ground of civil and
religious liberty. Before he left England he used to say he knew of
monarchy, anarchy, aristocracy, democracy, oligarchy, only as
hard words to be looked for in a dictionary. But his interest in
problems of government began to be awakened while he was
among the Dutch. He served in the regiment of Lord Craven, and
afterward in that of Sir Robert Stone; was much at The Hague;
became familiar with the Court of the Prince of Orange, and with
King James's daughter, the Queen of Bohemia, who, with her
husband the Prince Elector, was then a fugitive to Holland. Lord
Harrington, who had once acted as governor to the princess, and
won her affection, was James Harrington's uncle, and she now
cordially welcomed the young student of life for his uncle's sake,
and for his own pleasantness of outward wit and inward gravity of
thought. Harrington was taken with him by the exiled and
plundered Prince Elector, when he paid a visit to the Court of
Denmark, and he was intrusted afterward with the chief care of the
prince's affairs in England.

From Holland, James Harrington passed through Flanders into
France, and thence to Italy. When he came hack to England, some
courtiers who were with him in Rome told Charles I that
Harrington had been too squeamish at the Pope's consecration of
wax lights, in refusing to obtain a light, as others did, by kissing
his Holiness's toe. The King told Harrington that he might have
complied with a custom which only signified respect to a temporal
prince. But his Majesty was satisfied with the reply, that having
had the honor to kiss his Majesty's hand, he thought it beneath him
to kiss any other prince's foot.

Of all places in Italy, Venice pleased Harrington best. He was
deeply interested ill the Venetian form of government, and his
observations bore fruit in many suggestions for the administration
of the Commonwealth of Oceana.

After his return to England, being of age, James Harrington cared
actively for the interests of his younger brothers and sisters. It was
he who made his brother William a merchant. William Harrington
throve, and for his ingenuity in matters of construction he was
afterward made one of the Fellows of the newly formed Royal
Society. He took pains over the training of his sisters, making 110
difference between sisters and half-sisters, and treating his
step-mother as a mother. He filled his home with loving-kindness,
and was most liberal in giving help to friends. When he was told
that he often threw away his bounty on ungrateful persons, he
playfully told his advisers they were mercenary and that he saw
they sold their gifts, since they expected so great a return as
gratitude.

James Harrington's bent was for the study of life, and he made no
active suit for court employment. But he went to court, where
Charles I liked him, and admitted him as one of his privy chamber
extraordinary, in which character he went with the King in his first
expedition against the Scots.

Because Charles I knew him and liked him, and because he had
shown himself no partisan of either side in the civil war, though he
was known to be inclined, in the way of abstract opinion, toward a
form of government that was not monarchy, the commissioners
appointed in 1646 to bring Charles from Newcastle named
Harrington as one of the King's attendants. The King was pleased,
and Harrington was appointed a groom of the bedchamber at
Holmby. He followed faithfully the fortunes of the fallen King,
never saying even to the King himself a word in contradiction of
his own principles of liberty, and finding nothing in his principles
or in his temper that should prevent him from paying honor to his
sovereign, and seeking to secure for him a happy issue out of his
afflictions. Antony a Wood says that " His Majesty loved
Harrington's company, and, finding him to be an ingenious man,
chose rather to converse with him than with others of his chamber:
they had often discourses concerning government; but when they
happened to talk of a commonwealth the King seemed not to
endure it."

Harrington used all the influence he had with those in whose
power the King was, to prevent the urging of avoid-able questions
that would stand in the way of such a treaty as they professed to
seek during the King's imprisonment at Carisbrooke. Harrington's
friendly interventions on the King's behalf before the Parliament
commissioners at New-port caused him, indeed, to be suspected;
and when the King was removed from Carisbrooke to Hurst Castle,
Harrington was not allowed to remain in his service. But
afterward, when King Charles was being taken to Windsor,
Harrington got leave to bid him farewell at the door of his
carriage. As he was about to kneel, the King took him by the hand
and pulled him in. For a few days lie was left with the King, but an
oath was required of him that he would not assist in, or conceal
knowledge of any attempt to procure, the King's escape. He would
not take the oath; and was this time not only dismissed from the
King's service but himself imprisoned, until Ireton obtained his
release. Before the King's death, Harrington found his way to him
again, and he was among those who were with Charles I upon the
scaffold.

After the King's execution, Harrington was for some time secluded
in his study. Monarchy was gone; some form of commonwealth
was to be established; and he set to work upon the writing of
"Oceana," calmly to show what form of government, since men
were free to choose, to him seemed best.

He based his work on an opinion he had formed that the troubles
of the time were not due wholly to the intemperance of faction, the
misgovernment of a king, or the stubbornness of a people, but to
change in the balance of property; and he laid the foundations of
his commonwealth in the opinion that empire follows the balance
of property. Then he showed the commonwealth of Oceana in
action, with safeguards against future shiftings of that balance, and
with a popular government in which all offices were filled by men
chosen by ballot, who should hold office for a limited term. Thus
there was to be a constant flow of new blood through the political
system, and the representative was to be kept true as a reflection of
the public mind.

The Commonwealth of Oceana was England. Harrington called
Scotland Marpesia; and Ireland, Panopea. London he called
Emporium; the Thames, Halcionia; Westminster, Hiera;
Westminster Hall, Pantheon. The Palace of St. James was Alma;
Hampton Court, Convallium; Windsor, Mount Celia. By Hemisna,
Harrington meant the river Trent. Past sovereigns of England he
renamed for Oceana: William the Conqueror became Turbo; King
John, Adoxus; Richard II, Dicotome; Henry VII, Panurgus; Henry
VIII, Coraunus; Elizabeth, Parthenia; James I, Morpheus. He
referred to Hobbes as Leviathan; and to Francis Bacon, as
Verulamius. Oliver Cromwell he renamed Olphaus Megaletor.

Harrington's book was seized while printing, and carried to
Whitehall. Harrington went to Cromwell's daughter, Lady
Claypole, played with her three-year-old child while waiting for
her, and said to her, when she came and found him with her little
girl upon his lap, " Madam, you have come in the nick of time, for
I was just about to steal this pretty lady." "Why should you?"
"Why shouldn't I, unless you cause your father to restore a child of
mine that lie has stolen?" It was only, he said, a kind of political
romance; so far from any treason against her father that he hoped
she would let him know it was to be dedicated to him. So the
book was restored; and it was published in the time of Cromwell's
Commonwealth, in the year 1656.

This treatise, which had its origin in the most direct pressure of the
problem of government upon the minds of men continues the
course of thought on which Machiavelli's " Prince " had formed
one famous station, and Hobbes's Leviathan," another.

Oceana," when published, was widely read and actively attacked.
One opponent of its doctrines was Dr. Henry Ferne, afterward
Bishop of Chester. Another was Matthew Wren, eldest son to the
Bishop of Ely. He was one of those who met for scientific research
at the house of Dr. Wilkins, and had, said Harrington, " an
excellent faculty of magnifying a louse and diminishing a
commonwealth."

In 1659, Harrington published an abridgment of his Oceana as
"The Art of Lawgiving," in three books. Other pieces followed, in
which he defended or developed his opinions. He again urged
them when Cromwell's Commonwealth was in its death-throes.
Then he fell back upon argument at nightly meetings of a Rota
Club which met in the New Palace Yard, Westminster. Milton's
old pupil, Cyriac Skinner, was one of its members; and its
elections were by ballot, with rotation in the tenure of all offices.
The club was put an end to at the Restoration, when Harrington
retired to his study and amused himself by putting his " System of
Politics" into the form of " Aphorisms."

On December 28, 1661, James Harrington, then fifty years old,
was arrested and carried to the Tower as a traitor. His Aphorisms
were on his desk, and as they also were to be carried off, he asked
only that they might first be stitched together in their proper order.
Why he was arrested, he was not told. One of his sisters pleaded in
vain to the King. He was falsely accused of complicity in an
imaginary plot, of which nothing could be made by its
investigators. No heed was paid to the frank denials of a man of
the sincerest nature, who never had concealed his thoughts or
actions. "Why," he was asked, at his first examination by Lord
Lauderdale, who was one of his kinsmen, "why did he, as a private
man, meddle with politics? What had a private man to do with
government?" His answer was: "My lord, there is not any public
person, nor any magistrate, that has written on politics, worth a
button. All they that have been excellent in this way have been
private men, as private men, my lord, as myself. There is Plato,
there is Aristotle, there is Livy, there is Machiavel. My lord, I can
sum up Aristotle's ' Politics in a very few words: he says, there is
the Barbarous Monarchy-such a one where the people have 110
votes in making the laws; he says, there is the Heroic
Monarchy-such a one where the people have their votes in making
the laws; and then, he says, there is Democracy, and affirms that a
man cannot be said to have liberty but in a democracy only." Lord
Lauderdale here showing impatience, Harrington added: "I say
Aristotle says so. I have not said so much. And under what prince
was it? Was it not under Alexander, the greatest prince then in the
world? I beseech you, my lord, did Alexander hang up Aristotle?
did he molest him? Livy, for a commonwealth, is one of the
fullest authors; did not he write under Augustus Caesar? Did
Caesar hang up Livy? did he molest him? Machiavel, what a
commonwealthsman was he! but he wrote under the Medici when
they were princes in Florence: did they hang up Machiavel, or did
they molest him? I have done no otherwise than as the greatest
politicians: the King will do no otherwise than as the greatest
princes."

That was too much to hope, even in a dream, of the low-minded
Charles II. Harrington could not obtain even the show of justice in
a public trial. He was kept five months an untried prisoner in the
Tower, only sheltered from daily brutalities by bribe to the
lieutenant. When his habeas corpus had been moved for, it was at
first flatly refused;. and when it had been granted, Harrington was
smuggled away from the Tower between one and two o'clock in
the morning, and carried on board a ship that took him to closer
imprisonment on St. Nicholas Island, opposite Plymouth. There
his health suffered seriously, and his family obtained his removal
to imprisonment in Plymouth by giving a bond of œ5,000 as
sureties against his escape. In Plymouth, Harrington suffered from
scurvy, and at last he became insane.

When he had been made a complete wreck in body and in -mind,
his gracious Majesty restored Harrington to his family. He never
recovered health, but still occupied himself much with his pen,
writing, among other things, a serious argument to prove that they
were themselves mad who thought him so.

In those last days of his shattered life James Harrington married an
old friend of the family, a witty lady, daughter of Sir Marmaduke
Dorrell, of Buckinghamshire. Gout was added to his troubles ;
then lie was palsied ; and he died at Westminster, at the age of
sixty-six, on September 11, 1677. He was buried in St. Margaret's
Church, by the grave of Sir Walter Raleigh, on the south side of
the altar.

H. M.

OCEANA

Part I

THE PRELIMINARIES

Showing the Principles of Government

JANOTTI, the most excellent describer of the Commonwealth of
Venice, divides the whole series of government into two times or
periods: the one ending with the liberty of Rome, which was the
course or empire, as I may call it, of ancient prudence, first
discovered to mankind by God himself in the fabric of the
commonwealth of Israel, and afterward picked out of his footsteps
in nature, and unanimously followed by the Greeks and Romans; the
other beginning with the arms of Caesar, which, extinguishing
liberty, were the transition of ancient into modern prudence,
introduced by those inundations of Huns, Goths, Vandals,
Lombards, Saxons, which, breaking the Roman Empire, deformed the
whole face of the world with those ill-features of government,
which at this time are become far worse in these western parts,
except Venice, which, escaping the hands of the barbarians by
virtue of its impregnable situation, has had its eye fixed upon
ancient prudence, and is attained to a perfection even beyond the
copy.

Relation being had to these two times, government (to define
it de jure, or according to ancient prudence) is an art whereby a
civil society of men is instituted and preserved upon the
foundation of common right or interest; or, to follow Aristotle
and Livy, it is the empire of laws, and not of men.

And government (to define it de facto, or according to modern
prudence) is an art whereby some man, or some few men, subject a
city or a nation, and rule it according to his or their private
interest; which, because the laws in such cases are made
according to the interest of a man, or of some few families, may
be said to be the empire of men, and not of laws.

The former kind is that which Machiavel (whose books are
neglected) is the only politician that has gone about to
retrieve; and that Leviathan (who would have his book imposed
upon the universities) goes about to destroy. For "it is," says
he, "another error of Aristotle's politics that in a well-ordered
commonwealth, not men should govern, but the laws. What man that
has his natural senses, though he can neither write nor read,
does not find himself governed by them he fears, and believes can
kill or hurt him when he obeys not? or, who believes that the law
can hurt him, which is but words and paper, without the hands and
swords of men?" I confess that the magistrate upon his bench is
that to the law which a gunner upon his platform is to his
cannon. Nevertheless, I should not dare to argue with a man of
any ingenuity after this manner. A whole army, though they can
neither write nor read, are not afraid of a platform, which they
know is but earth or stone; nor of a cannon, which, without a
hand to give fire to it, is but cold iron; therefore a whole army
is afraid of one man. But of this kind is the ratiocination of
Leviathan, as I shall show in divers places that come in my way,
throughout his whole politics, or worse; as where he says, "of
Aristotle and of Cicero, of the Greeks, and of the Romans, who
lived under popular States, that they derived those rights, not
from the principles of nature, but transcribed them into their
books out of the practice of their own commonwealths, as
grammarians describe the rules of language out of poets." Which
is as if a man should tell famous Harvey that he transcribed his
circulation of the blood, not out of the principles of nature,
but out of the anatomy of this or that body.

To go on therefore with his preliminary discourse, I shall
divide it, according to the two definitions of government
relating to Janotti's two times, in two parts: the first,
treating of the principles of government in general, and
according to the ancients; the second, treating of the late
governments of Oceana in particular, and in that of modern
prudence.

Government, according to the ancients, and their learned
disciple Machiavel, the only politician of later ages, is of
three kinds: the government of one man, or of the better sort, or
of the whole people; which, by their more learned names, are
called monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. These they hold,
through their proneness to degenerate, to be all evil. For
whereas they that govern should govern according to reason, if
they govern according to passion they do that which they should
not do. Wherefore, as reason and passion are two things, so
government by reason is one thing, and the corruption of
government by passion is another thing, but not always another
government: as a body that is alive is one thing, and a body that
is dead is another thing, but not always another creature, though
the corruption of one comes at length to be the generation of
another. The corruption then of monarchy is called tyranny; that
of aristocracy, oligarchy and that of democracy, anarchy. But
legislators, having found these three governments at the best to
be naught, have invented another, consisting of a mixture of them
all, which only is good. This is the doctrine of the ancients.

But Leviathan is positive that they are all deceived, and
that there is no other government in nature than one of the
three; as also that the flesh of them cannot stink, the names of
their corruptions being but the names of men's fancies, which
will be understood when we are shown which of them was Senatus
Populusque Romanus.

To go my own way, and yet to follow the ancients, the
principles of government are twofold: internal, or the goods of
the mind; and external, or the goods of fortune. The goods of the
mind are natural or acquired virtues, as wisdom, prudence, and
courage, etc. The goods of fortune are riches. There be goods
also of the body, as health, beauty, strength; but these are not
to be brought into account upon this score, because if a man or
an army acquires victory or empire, it is more from their
discipline, arms, and courage than from their natural health,
beauty, or strength, in regard that a people conquered may have
more of natural strength, beauty, and health, and yet find little
remedy. The principles of government then are in the goods of the
mind, or in the goods of fortune. To the goods of the mind
answers authority; to the goods of fortune, power or empire.
Wherefore Leviathan, though he be right where he says that
"riches are power," is mistaken where he says that "prudence, or
the reputation of prudence, is power;" for the learning or
prudence of a man is no more power than the learning or prudence
of a book or author, which is properly authority. A learned
writer may have authority though he has no power; and a foolish
magistrate may have power, though he has otherwise no esteem or
authority. The difference of these two is observed by Livy in
Evander, of whom he says that he governed rather by the authority
of others than by his own power.

To begin with riches, in regard that men are hung upon these,
not of choice as upon the other, but of necessity and by the
teeth; forasmuch as he who wants bread is his servant that will
feed him, if a man thus feeds a whole people, they are under his
empire.

Empire is of two kinds, domestic and national, or foreign and
provincial.

Domestic empire is founded upon dominion. Dominion is
property, real or personal; that is to say, in lands, or in money
and goods.

Lands, or the parts and parcels of a territory, are held by
the proprietor or proprietors, lord or lords of it, in some
proportion; and such (except it be in a city that has little or
no land, and whose revenue is in trade) as is the proportion or
balance of dominion or property in land, such is the nature of
the empire.

If one man be sole landlord of a territory, or overbalance
the people, for example, three parts in four, he is grand
seignior; for so the Turk is called from his property, and his
empire is absolute monarchy.

If the few or a nobility, or a nobility with the clergy, be
landlords, or overbalance the people to the like proportion, it
makes the Gothic balance (to be shown at large in the second part
of this discourse), and the empire is mixed monarchy, as that of
Spain, Poland, and late of Oceana.

And if the whole people be landlords, or hold the lands so
divided among them that no one man, or number of men, within the
compass of the few or aristocracy, overbalance them, the empire
(without the interposition of force) is a commonwealth.

If force be interposed in any of these three cases, it must
either frame the government to the foundation, or the foundation
to the government; or holding the government not according to the
balance, it is not natural, but violent; and therefore if it be
at the devotion of a prince, it is tyranny; if at the devotion of
the few, oligarchy; or if in the power of the people, anarchy:
Each of which confusions, the balance standing otherwise, is but
of short continuance, because against the nature of the balance,
which, not destroyed, destroys that which opposes it.

But there be certain other confusions, which, being rooted in
the balance, are of longer continuance, and of worse consequence;
as, first, where a nobility holds half the property, or about
that proportion, and the people the other half; in which case,
without altering the balance there is no remedy but the one must
eat out the other, as the people did the nobility in Athens, and
the nobility the people in Rome. Secondly, when a prince holds
about half the dominion, and the people the other half (which was
the case of the Roman emperors, planted partly upon their
military colonies and partly upon the Senate and the people), the
government becomes a very shambles, both of the princes and the
people. Somewhat of this nature are certain governments at this
day, which are said to subsist by confusion. In this case, to fix
the balance is to entail misery; but in the three former, not to
fix it is to lose the government. Wherefore it being unlawful in
Turkey that any should possess land but the Grand Seignior, the
balance is fixed by the law, and that empire firm. Nor, though
the kings often sell was the throne of Oceana known to shake,
until the statute of alienations broke the pillars, by giving way
to the nobility to sell their estates. While Lacedaemon held to
the division of land made by Lycurgus, it was immovable; but,
breaking that, could stand no longer. This kind of law fixing the
balance in lands is called agrarian, and was first introduced by
God himself, who divided the land of Canaan to his people by
lots, and is of such virtue that wherever it has held, that
government has not altered, except by consent; as in that
unparalleled example of the people of Israel, when being in
liberty they would needs choose a king. But without an agrarian
law, government, whether monarchical, aristocratical, or popular,
has no long lease.

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