When the term COMMONWEALTH deeply occupied the minds of men, they had
formed no settled notions about the thing itself; the term became
equivocal, of such wide signification that it was misunderstood and
misapplied, and always ambiguous; and a confusion of words led many
writers into a confusion of notions.
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 publicae_, 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.