The term Commonweal, or wealth, indeed appears in our statutes, in the speeches of our monarchs, and in the political works of our writers, long before the idea of a republic, in its popular sense, was promulgated by the votaries of democracy. The term Commonweal explains itself; it specifies no particular polity but the public weal; and even the term republic originally meant nothing more than res publicæ, or “the affairs of the public.” Sir Thomas Smith, the learned secretary to Elizabeth, who has written on the English constitution, entitles his work “The Commonwealth of England.” James the First justly called himself “the great servant of the Commonwealth.” The Commonwealth, meaning the kingdom of England, is the style of all the learned in law.
The ambiguity of the term Commonwealth soon caused it to be perverted by the advocates of popular government, who do not distinguish the State from the people; this appears as early as the days of Rawleigh, who tells us, that “the government of all the common and baser sort is by an usurped nick-name called a Commonwealth.”[1]
It was in the revolutionary period of Charles the First that the terms Commonwealth and Commonwealth-man were adopted by the governing party, as precisely describing their purity of devotion to the public weal. In the temper of the times the Commonwealth became opposed to the monarchy, and the Commonwealth-man to the royalist. Cromwell ironically asked what was a Commonwealth? affecting an ignorance of the term.
When Baxter wrote his “Holy Commonwealth” against Harrington’s “Heathenish Commonwealth,” he had said, “I plead the cause of monarchy as better than democracy or aristocracy.” Toland, a Commonwealth-man in the new sense, referring to Baxter’s work, exclaims that “A monarchy is an odd way of modelling a Commonwealth.” Baxter alluded to an English Commonwealth in its primitive sense, and Toland restricted the term to its modern application. Indeed, Toland exults in the British constitution being a Commonwealth in the popular sense, in his preface to his edition of Harrington’s works, and has the merit of bringing forward as his authority the royal name of James the First, and which afterwards seems to have struck Locke as so apposite that he condescended to repeat it. The passage in Toland is curious: “It is undeniably manifest that the English government is already a Commonwealth the most free and best constituted in the world. This was frankly acknowledged by King James the First, who styled himself the great servant of the Commonwealth.” One hardly suspected a republican of gravely citing the authority of the royal sage on any position!
The Restoration made the term Commonwealth-man odious as marking out a class of citizens in hostility to the government; and Commonwealth seems, in any sense, to have long continued such an offensive word that it required the nicest delicacy to handle it. The use of the term has even drawn an apology from Locke himself when writing on “government.” “By Commonwealth,” says our philosophical politician, “I must be understood all along to mean, not a democracy, but any independent community, which the Latins signified by the word civitas, to which the word which best answers in our language is Commonwealth.” However, Locke does not close his sentence without some trepidation for the use of an unequivocal term, obnoxious even under the new monarchy of the revolution. “To avoid ambiguity, I crave leave to use the word Commonwealth in that sense in which I find it used by King James the First, and I take it to be its genuine signification—which if anybody dislike, I consent with him to change it for a better!” An ample apology! but one which hardly suits the dignity of the philosophical writer.
[1] Rawleigh’s “Remains.”
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