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tranibors and other magistrates are chosen annually. The tranibors form the prince's council, but two syphogrants are always present at the deliberations.

Sir T. More, however, does not dwell on the form of the Utopian government. His main object is to describe its social institutions and laws. It is these which characterize his ideal state, and which contain whatever there is of original, important, or instructive in his views. Accordingly, he gives a copious survey of their system of agricultural and manufacturing labour

of their trade—their domestic institutions-their slavery—their military discipline and mode of warfare-their rules as to travelling -their punishments and rewards-their religious opinions their science, literature, and arts. Sir T. More so far departs from the Platonic model of communism, that he recognises marriage—but he retains community of goods. He thinks that, as long as there is any property, and while money is the standard of all other things, a nation cannot be governed justly or happily.'(8) Until property is taken away, there can be no equitable or just distribution made of things, nor can the world be happily governed.'() In Utopia, whatever is manufactured by private families is deposited in public magazines, from which every father of a family may take what he thinks fit, without payment. With respect to the produce of the earth, the superabundance of one part of the island supplies the deficiency of another, freely, without exchange, so that the whole island is, as it were, one family. When the

produce of the land exceeds the wants of the native population, the surplus is exported: a seventh part of the exports is given to the poor of the countries to which they are sent the rest is sold at moderate rates. (8) The Utopians, likewise, as well as the citizens of the Platonic state, mess together at public tables. They make no use of money, and they set no value upon gold and silver, or precious stones. They likewise prohibit lawyersevery one of them is skilled in their law: it is a very short study, and the plainest meaning of which words are capable is always

(83) B. i.

(84) Ibid.

(85) B. ii.

the sense of their laws. They detest war, and despise military glory, and only fight in self-defence. Sir T. More retains slavery, in a modified form, as an institution of his best possible state, which, considering that villenage was virtually extinct in England in his time, is a remarkable proof of the influence which the opinions of the ancient philosophers exercised upon his lations. When the description of the constitution of the Utopian commonwealth has been completed, it is declared to be not only the best in the world, but to be, indeed, the only commonwealth which truly deserves that name.'

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The New Atlantis of Bacon-the name of which is borrowed from Plato's fiction of a supposed island or continent in the far west()—is an unfinished work, containing a description of a college, under the name of Solomon's House, established for the interpretation of nature and the production of beneficial inventions. His lordship (says Rawley) intended, in the same fable, 'to have composed a frame of laws, or of the best state or mould of a commonwealth,' but was prevented from executing his design. (87)

§ 16 Another work, belonging to the same class, and not long posterior to the Utopia and the Nova Atlantis, was the Civitas Solis of Campanella. (8) This writer-a Calabrese monkhad been a practical revolutionist in his native country; and, after having been subjected to torture and imprisonment by the Spanish viceroy of Naples, luckily escaped with his life, and was able to take refuge in Paris, where he published some works of great speculative freedom in religion and morals.

The Civitas Solis is in the form of a dialogue between the grand master of the Hospitallers, and the captain of a Genoese

(86) See Martin, Etudes sur le Timée de Platon, tom. i. p. 257: ‘Dissertation sur l'Atlantide.'

(87) Bacon's Works, vol. ii. p. 321.

(88) The Civitas Solis was first printed in 1637, at the end of his Philosophia Realis Libri quatuor, Paris, fol. The author died in 1639. In the Utrecht edition of 1643, the title is thus given: F. Thomæ Campanella Civitas Solis Poetica-Idea Reipublicæ Philosophica.' There is a recent French translation of this work, by Villegardelle (Paris, 1840), to which an account of Campanella is prefixed.

vessel, the latter of whom narrates the constitution of a commonwealth, which he is supposed to have found in the Island of Taprobane, or Ceylon. The head of this state was called HOH— in our language the Metaphysician. He was assisted by three ministers, named Pon, Sin, and Mor-in our language, Power, Wisdom, and Love. The laws and administration of this imaginary state are described in detail, the most characteristic of which are community of women and of goods. The Solarians, moreover, never engage in any war which is not strictly defensive, and they use money only for buying, not for selling.

§ 17 Harrington's Oceana() was the fruit of the English civil war, and of the impulse which political speculation, and the formation of ideal constitutions, received from the execution of the king, and the destruction of the established government. The work was composed after the king's death, and published in 1656 Cromwell's consent to its publication being with difficulty obtained. The names are fictitious, but the application of the scheme to England is direct and avowed. England, Scotland, and Ireland, are represented under the names of Oceana, Marpesia, and Panopæa, while Olphaus Megaletor, the lord archon of the ideal state, is the lord protector, Oliver. (9) Harrington (1) declares in the introduction, that his work is the offspring of the civil war.(9) Its details are too copious to admit of abridgment;

(89) Concerning Harrington's Oceana, see Hallam, Lit. of Eur. vol. iv. p. 366; Hume's Essays, part 1, essay 16, 'On the Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth.'

(90) See a list of the names in Toland's Life, (p. xxi.) prefixed to his Works, 1 vol. fol. 1737.

(91) Harrington was one of the leading members of a club called the Rota, which met under the Protectorate, to discuss and promote constitutional schemes.-Ib. p. xxviii.

(92) These countries, having been anciently distinct and hostile kingdoms, came by Morpheus the Marpesian [James I.], who succeeded by hereditary right to the crown of Oceana, not only to be joined under one head, but to be cast, as it were by a charm, into that profound sleep, which, broken at length by the trumpet of civil war, has produced those effects that have given occasion to the ensuing discourse, divided into four parts.' -Oceana, p. 36.

According to Toland, (Life, p. xvii.) the account which Harrington gave his friends of the origin of his Oceana was as follows:-'That ever since he began to examine things seriously, he had principally addicted himself

but it is manifestly intended as a practical project for the remodelling of the English government under the protectorship of Cromwell, and it was so considered by the author.() Though the form is that of a fiction, or (as Harrington himself called it, when soliciting permission to print it) a 'political romance,'(") yet it consists principally of a plan of a constitution drawn up under separate heads, and with the precision of a practical legislator, while the introductory part is in the form of a positive treatise on the principles of government. Harrington evidently wished to be the Sièyes of the English revolution,(5) and his Oceana was a practical plan, disguised, from prudential motives, in a masquerade dress.

§ 18 The representation of ideal states of society through the medium of imaginary nations, discovered by supposed navigators-sometimes in a literal, and sometimes in a satirical spirit was continued about this time by various writers of greater or less celebrity. The Mundus alter et idem of Bishop Hall, pub

to the study of civil government, as being of the highest importance to the peace and felicity of mankind; and that he succeeded, at least to his own satisfaction, being now convinced that no government is of so accidental or arbitrary an institution as people are wont to imagine, there being in societies natural causes producing their necessary effects, as well as in the earth or the air. Hence he frequently argued, that the troubles of his time were not to be wholly attributed to wilfulness or faction, neither to the misgovernment of the prince, nor the stubbornness of the people; but to a change in the balance of property, which, ever since Henry the Seventh's time, was daily falling into the scale of the commons from that of the king and the lords, as in his book he evidently demonstrates and explains. ...His chief aim, therefore, was to find out a method of preventing such distempers, or to apply the best remedies when they happened to break out.'

(93) See the epitome of the whole commonwealth, p. 204.

(94) Toland's Life, p. xix. That Cromwell understood Harrington's work as being, in substance, a proposal for the establishment of a constitution which would place limits upon his power, is evident from his remark upon it, as reported by Toland: After the perusal of it, he said the gentleman had like to trepan him out of his power, but that what he got by the sword he would not quit for a little paper shot; adding, in his usual cant, that he approved the government of a single person as little as any them, but that he was forced to take upon him the office of a high constable, to preserve the peace among the several parties in the nation, since he saw that, being left to themselves, they would never agree to any certain form of government, and would only spend their whole power in defeating the designs, or destroying the persons, of one another.—Ib. p. xx,

(95) See Burke, Letter to a Noble Lord.

of

lished in the early part of the seventeenth century, is a broad satire, composed under fictitious names of countries, each distinguished by its appropriate vice, as Crapulia, Yvronia, Lavernia.(9) Swift's Lilliput and Brobdignag may likewise be considered as ideal states, the conception of which was borrowed from some of the works already mentioned. (97) Even in the more serious of these, as the Utopia, the satirical vein is often very perceptible.

The History of the Sevarambians, a description of an imaginary people in the Southern Ocean, appeared almost simultaneously in London and Paris, near the end of the seventeenth century. Like other works of this class, it departed widely from received practices and opinions: thus, it proscribed all social distinctions arising from birth, all private property, and all arts which minister to luxury; it provided that all children, after seven years of age, should be adopted by the state; and it recommended a system of natural religion.(9) The Aventures de Jacques Sadeur, another supposed description of an austral nation, in which similar communist notions occur, was published about the same time.(99) In this Utopia, the difficulty about marriage, and the appropriation of women, is overcome by the hypothesis of an androgynous people. All things, however, are in common -the distinction between meum and tuum is unknown. They

(96) In Bishop Hall's Works, vol. xii. (ed. 1839). See Bayle, Dict. art. Hall,' note G. Hallam, Lit. of Europe, vol. iii. p. 684.

(97) Concerning the resemblance of Gulliver to the Utopian class of fictions, see Scott's Life of Swift, p. 339, ed. 8vo.

(98) The authorship of this work is uncertain. That of the French version, which is considerably enlarged and altered from the English original, appears to be fixed by sufficient testimony to an obscure French writer, named Vairasse d'Allais. The author of the English work is unknown.-See Notes and Queries, vol. iii.

(99) This work was first printed at Geneva in 1676. The author of it was a French monk, named Gabriel Foigny, who left his convent, and embraced the protestant faith. It has since been reprinted more than once the last edition is in the collection of Voyages Imaginaires, tom. xxiv. The recent reprints are taken from an edition of 1692, which was altered by the Abbé Raguenet. An English translation was published at London, in 1693. It was also translated into German. See Bayle, Dict. art. 'Sadeur,' note G.; Biogr. Univ. in 'Foigny ;' Barbier, Dict. des Anonymes, Nos. 1441, 17,668; Mylius, Bibl. Anon. et Pseud. part ii. p. 159.

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