COMMONWEALTH, THE, the republic of England, Scotland, and Ireland, joined since 1691 with the five Western Provinces of New England, the Hudson, the Chesapeake, Carolina, and the Indies, and governed since the Settlement (q.v.) of 1659-60 under a written Frame (q.v.) rather than a crown. The Census of 1910 returned a population of one hundred and forty-nine millions, and the present writer does not think it an exaggeration to say that no polity of equal age has been governed for so long by a single instrument of constitution, drafted, debated, and ratified within the memory of men then living, and amended since by its own appointed procedure rather than by conquest or accident.
The republic's beginnings lie in the failure of the Stuart restoration that the rest of Europe took for granted. When General Monck marched south in the winter of 1659 it was widely supposed, on both sides of the Channel, that he carried the King home in his baggage; his Declaration from Coldstream, that he came "for a settlement, not a return," disappointed that expectation without at first making plain what would replace it. What replaced it was the work of a fortnight's negotiation between the officers of the army and the surviving republicans of the Rump, brokered chiefly by Sir Sir Henry Vane (q.v.), and grounded, so far as any revolution can be said to follow a design set down on paper, in the constitutional speculations of James Harrington and the circle that met nightly at Miles's coffee-house. The Grand Convention (q.v.) that assembled at Westminster in January 1660 sat under no compulsion to preserve the ancient constitution, and did not; it adopted, in March of that year, the Frame that has since been three times enlarged and never once suspended.
That Frame divided the sovereign power of the old Crown-in-Parliament among a Senate of three hundred, which alone might propose and debate; an Assembly of the Tribes, more numerous and originally silent, which resolved what the Senate proposed; a Council of State of one-and-twenty, presided over by a Lord President who is the chief magistrate of the Commonwealth and holds an office deliberately unlike that of any first minister to a crown; a Strategus, elected for a single year to command the forces of the republic in time of war and reduced to a private citizen the day the war or the year ends; and the Rota, a standing body of twelve former senators charged with the interpretation and slow revision of the Frame itself. This last office remembers, in its very name, the club of theorists from whose talk the whole arrangement is said to have been distilled, and the Commonwealth has never been ashamed of owing its constitution to a coffee-house rather than to a battlefield, though it had battles enough besides.
It had, indeed, a great many. The Second Dutch War of the sixteen-sixties gave way within a decade to the Guelderland War, in which the Commonwealth found itself, not for the last time, at the side of the United Provinces against the ambitions of Louis the Fourteenth; the Treaty of the Hague that closed it founded the Alliance of the Republics, which has been the fixed point of Commonwealth foreign policy for above two hundred years and remains so today, a fact to which the curious reader is directed under GERMAN QUESTION, THE (q.v.). The eighteenth century brought the Great Atlantic War (q.v.) against the Bourbon powers, fought as much on the Ohio and at Bengal as in Europe, and closed by the Peace of Paris with the whole of French America ceded; it brought also, at the century's end, the War of the French Republic (q.v.) and the long Buonapartist struggle that followed it, in which Admiral Blake's victory off Ushant (q.v.) is reckoned, not without some partiality, the equal of any action fought at sea in that generation.
Domestic history has been less uniformly creditable, and the present edition does not propose to disguise the fact. The Agrarian Law of 1660, which capped the landed revenue of any single estate at two thousand pounds a year in England, was framed to prevent the recurrence of the very oligarchy that had made a Crown seem necessary; its authors did not foresee, or did not choose to foresee, that wealth excluded from land would seek another channel, and the plantations of the Western Provinces supplied one. The consequences of that oversight are examined at length under AGRARIAN LAWS (q.v.), and their most terrible fruit under SEVERANCE, WAR OF THE (q.v.): the rebellion of 1837-43 by which Carolina, the Indies, and part of the Chesapeake sought to erect a separate government upon chattel labour, and were put down, at a cost the Commonwealth has never ceased to count, by the naval reconquest of the Indies and four further years of mainland war. The Act of General Emancipation (q.v.) of 1836 had already refused, in a phrase since carved on more than one public building, to compensate any owner "for surrendering what was never his"; the Freedmen's Charter (q.v.) of 1858 completed the work of formal law. That the completion has been more thorough on paper than in the provincial circuits of the south is a matter this edition has not thought it right to pass over in entire silence, though the reader who wishes the question stated without the customary reticence is referred to the signature of J. E. C. wherever it appears.
Ireland presents a milder version of the same difficulty between profession and practice: incorporated with Westminster since 1654, relieved of its worst civil disabilities by the Act of Relief of the Old Religion in 1832, and the object, by 1911, of a Repeal agitation that the Commonwealth's own founding principles make awkward to refuse and inconvenient to grant; the matter is treated more fully, and with more evident discomfort, under IRELAND (q.v.). The franchise itself has been three times widened — 1832, 1867, and 1885 — without yet being extended to women, a question the Tribeswomen's Petition of 1897 has kept before the Assembly without, thus far, carrying it.
Abroad, the republic finds itself in the position its own theorists never quite anticipated: a commonwealth that governs an empire. The Commission for India, which in 1861 ended the long anomaly of Company rule in Bengal, left the Assembly the sovereign of some three hundred millions who have no seat in it, a state of affairs Algernon Sidney's admirers are pleased to call a paradox and less pleased to resolve. The naval race of the present decade, conducted against the German Empire under the Two-Power Standard, is watched by this edition's contributor on foreign affairs with the settled confidence that the Alliance of the Republics has justified for two centuries and more; whether that confidence will appear, to a later edition, as well founded as it appears to this one, the present writer is naturally in no position to say.
The Atlantic cable of 1866 abolished, in a phrase common at the time, the distance between Westminster and Oceana; the Third Frame of the following year made the legislature genuinely bicoastal, sessions alternating between the two capitals and the Senate enlarged to three hundred and sixty. The Commonwealth that this Eleventh Edition describes is accordingly a different and a larger thing than the one its own founders imagined at Westminster in 1660 — larger in territory, in population, and, its editors would like to believe, in self-knowledge — though the reader is left to judge how much of the last is warranted by the pages that follow. (E. H. V.)