THE TUDOR POLICY 29 was one which was calculated to attract the attention of a lover of the curious like the author of "Oceana." In this atmosphere, then, Harrington arrived at his first proposition, "as is the proportion or balance of Dominion or Property in Land, such is the nature of the Empire." When a single person is sole proprietor of a country's land, the government will be monarchical; when a limited number share it with him, the government will be that of a mixed monarchy; when the people own the soil, the government will be democratic. In this simple proposition Harrington saw the cause of the enormous upheaval in England and its remedy. " He traced the Civil War back to the policy of the Tudors. Henry VII. began the mischief with the Statutes of Population, Retainers and Alienation, which broke up the great estates of the barons and brought about a condition of affairs under which the great Tables of the Nobility no longer nourished veins that would bleed for them." Henry VIII. continued his father's work by dissolving the monasteries and giving their lands to men of new families. Elizabeth, “ converting her reign thro the perpetual love-tricks that past between her and her People into a kind of Romance," postponed the inevitable outcome of these measures. But under the Stuarts it became apparent that the monarchy had not got the necessary support to maintain its power, and it gave place to the Commonwealth. The continuation of this policy by Cromwell in the wholesale confiscation of the land of Crown, Church, and Royalist partisans pointed more and more to the necessity of democratic institutions for England. 1 " Oceana," p. 69. ■ Ibid. p. 69. 11:00 30 ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL POWER In pre-Tudor days, when the land was in the possession of a few barons and dignitaries of the Church dependent on the Crown, the natural form of government was a regulated monarchy; but with the enormous increase in the number of landowners, monarchical institutions had finally become impossible. There were two ways of remedying this fact and bringing about the coincidence of power and property. The government might be changed to suit the changed balance of property, or the balance of property could be changed so as to make the old form of government again possible. Harrington himself was of opinion that it was easier to change the form of government than to revert to old economic conditions, and was for this among other reasons the most uncompromising republican of his age. By Accepting as he did the altered economic conditions, he set out to formulate proposals which should establish the new government in greater security and render it more like the cities of Greek and Roman history that he so much admired. His proposals were intended to be enforced in an agrarian law, which he tabulated for his idealised England-Oceana. this measure the policy of breaking up large estates was to be pushed one stage further. The details were to be arranged after a valuation of the land had been made, but the provisional idea was to allow no one to possess land above the value of £2000 in England and Ireland, or £500 in Scotland, where the risk of the soil being monopolised by a few chieftains was especially great. Harrington estimated the total rent of the land of England and Wales at ten million 1 44 Oceana," p. 110. HARRINGTON'S AGRARIAN PROPOSALS 31 pounds, so that the total number of landowners would never fall below five thousand. It would probably be far larger in view of the absurdity of imagining five thousand men clinging to the possession of the exact maximum legally allowed to them, with everybody else looking on. But Harrington was not desirous of introducing a too sudden or drastic change. He therefore recommended that this breaking up of estates should be brought about quite gradually. There was one obvious method of achieving this. Interest in the question of the inheritance of estates had not been confined to the Diggers. A book entitled the Apology for the Younger Brother," or "The Younger Brother's Plea," had appeared from an Oxford press in 1636, and from 1641 to 1647 William Somner had been writing his " Treatise of Gavelkind.” * Both these men attacked the system of land-tenure which had been in vogue in England since the Norman Conquest, and proposed that the father should be allowed to divide his property among all his children or dispose of it as he might think best. The many favourable comments in the fugitive literature of the period show that there was a certain amount of feeling on the question; the resolution of the Long Parliament (1645), converting military tenures into soccage, which was already devisable, points in the same direction; and great stimulus was given to the whole movement by the account which travellers gave of its successful working in the Netherlands. Harrington therefore (himself an eldest son) proposed the abolition of this relic of feudalism as the 1 "The Art of Lawgiving," p. 457. Petty's estimate was eight millions See Hull, "The Economic Writings of Sir W. Petty," i. 105. "It was not published till 1659. 32 OBJECT OF THESE PROPOSALS least violent way of dividing the large estates. He supplemented it with two other proposals. He would forbid men who owned property worth £2000 or more to make a further acquisition by purchase, and he would restrict marriage portions to £1500. But with his belief in moderation he would not forbid acquisitions by legacy, and he made it clear that his agrarian law would only come into force in the case of children born seven years or more after its passing. His explanation that such a course would not bring any man from the customs to which he has been inur'd, nor from any emergent expectations he may have," reads like a passage from the individualistutilitarians of the nineteenth century. This proposal, far less radical than many proposals of the time, had the merits of brevity and clearness. It was defended on the grounds that a further partition of the land was necessary to secure the new republic in its democratic institutions. The ideal which Harrington had before him in making this suggestion was, as he tells us, the agricultural democracy which Aristotle had commended, or Rome in the simple brilliant days, when her generals left their ploughs for the battlefield. He was himself a country gentleman with a passion for the land, who took pride in the particular genius of the English people with their " aversion to the ways of the Court and their "country way of life," 3 and he hoped that certain social changes would follow his political reforms. The clergy and the lawyers were classes odious to the more radical sections of the popular " 1 "The Art of Lawgiving," p. 457. In his later pamphlets Harrington made such trifling additions to his theories that I have not hesitated to quote from these, as though they were written in the same year as Oceana." "Oceana," p. 178. • Ibid. p. 35. GOVERNMENT BY LANDED GENTRY 33 party. Both were supporters of the monarchy. Both depended for their existence on expert knowledge and acquaintance with what was thought to be unnecessary and deceptive lore. Both were foes to land, the clergy as monopolising a great part of it, the lawyers as responsible for all the obstructions put in the way of purchasers. Their numbers had been very largely recruited from the younger sons of gentle families, who had no opportunity of leading the life of country gentlemen. By giving every son the right to inherit a part of his father's estate, Harrington hoped that the obnoxious classes of clergy and lawyers would be curtailed and converted into an additional class of country gentlemen which would be to Oceana almost what the guardians were to Plato's Republic. In his "Discourses Discourses" 2 Machiavelli had written the following passage. "I call those Gentlemen who live idly and plentifully upon their estates without any care or employment, and they are very pernicious, wherever they are it would be impossible to erect a republic where they had the Dominion." In one respect the pupil did not follow his master. Like Sir Thomas Smith (whose book he had read), who was of opinion that gentlemen are made good cheap in . The following stanza in the song of the Diggers (1649) is noteworthy :--- Gainst Lawyers and gainst Priests, stand up now, For tyrants they are both even flat against their oath. To grant us they are loath free meat and drink and cloth. Stand up now, Diggers all." 1 It may be compared with Harrington's verdict of the two classes as "irreconcilable enemies of popular power," and his observation "With absolute Monarchy and with Aristocracy it is an innat Maxim that the People are to be deceived in two things, their Religion and their Law." 3 • Machiavelli, "Works," 1657 edition, p. 325. 1 Clarke Papers, ii. 223. 2 "The Art of Lawgiving," p. 432. 3 "A System of Politics," p. 509. |