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Who were better qualified than those men themselves, instructed in detail in all the peril of that crisis, men who had comprehended and weighed with a judgment which has left no successor to its seat, all the conflicting considerations and claims which that crisis brought with it, who better qualified than these to decide on the measures by which the hideous nuisances of that time should be abated; by which that axe, that sword, that rack, that stake, and all those burglar's tools, and highwayman's weapons, should be taken out of the hands of the mad licentious crew with which an evil time had armed them against the common-weal those weapons of lawless power, which the people had vainly, for want of leaders, refused before-hand to put into their hands.
Who wou'd not then be for a Common-weal, To have the Villain covered with his Zeal? A Zeal, who for Convenience can dispense With Plays provided there's no Wit nor Sense. For Wit's profane, and Jesuitical, And Plotting's Popery, and the Devil and all.
On the surface of this play, lies everywhere the question of the Common-Weal, in its relation to the good that is private and particular, scientifically reviewed, as a question in proportion, as the question of the whole against the part, of the greater against the less, nay, as the question of that which is against that which is not.
Only once, at a moment of the wild popular excitement which at that period was easy to provoke in Holland, there was a certain group of persons who would have shut him up as no well-wisher to, and perhaps a plotter against, the common-weal. A single traitor might cut the dykes in an hour, in the interest of the English or the French.
Only once, at a moment of the wild popular excitement which at that period was easy to provoke in Holland, there was a certain group of persons who would have shut him up as no well-wisher to, and perhaps a plotter against, the common-weal. A single traitor might cut the dykes in an hour, in the interest of the English or the French.
In the same manuscript letter I find that, when at Theobalds, the king, with his usual openness, was discoursing how he designed to govern; and as he would sometimes, like the wits of all nations and times, compress an argument into a play on words, the king said, "I will govern according to the good of the common-weal, but not according to the common-will!"
Good news, because that law of the greater whole, which is the worthier that law of the common-weal, which is the human law that law which in man is reason and conscience, is in the nature of things, and not in man only nay, not in man as yet, but prefigured only his ideal; his true form not in man, who 'IS' not, but 'becoming.
We know it was an age in which the decisions of the Bench were prescribed to it by a power that had 'the laws of England at its commandment, that it was an age in which Parliament, and the press, and the pulpit, were gagged, and in which that same justice had charge, diligent charge 'of amusements also, and of those who only played at working. That this was a time when the Play House itself, in that same year, too, in which these philosophical plays began first to attract attention, and again and again, was warned off by express ordinances from the whole ground of 'the forbidden questions. We know that this was an age in which not the books of the learned only were subjected to 'the press and torture which expulsed' from them all those 'particulars that point to action' action, at least, in which the common-weal of men is most concerned; that it was a time when the private manuscript was subjected to that same censorship and question, and corrected with those same instruments and engines, which made then a regular part of the machinery of the press; when the most secret cabinet of the Statesman and the Man of Letters must be kept in order for that revision, when his most confidential correspondence, his private note-book and diary must be composed under these restrictions; when in the church, not the pulpit only, but the secrets of the study, were explored for proofs of opposition to the power then predominant; when the private desk and drawers of the poor obscure country clergyman were ransacked, and his half-formed studies of sermons, his rude sketches and hypothetical notes of sermons yet to be which might or might not be put down for private purposes perhaps, and never intended to be preached were produced by Government as an excuse for subjecting him to indignities and cruelties to which those practised upon the Duke of Kent and the Duke of Gloster, in the play, formed no parallel.
The plan of this great scientific enterprise was one which embraced, from the first, the whole body of the common-weal. It concerned itself immediately and directly with all the parts and members of the social state, from the king on his throne to the beggar in his straw.
She is very potent in the business of the state, whether you take her in her first literal acceptation, as the representative mother, or whether you take her in that symbolical and allusive comprehension, to which the emphasis on the name is not unfrequently made to point, as 'the nurse and mother of all humanities, the instructor of the state, the former of its nobility, who in-forms their thoughts with nobleness, such nobleness, and such notions of it as they have, and who fits them for the place they are to occupy in the body of the common-weal.
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