natural causes producing their necessary effects, as well as in the earth or the air”; and one of these natural causes he had discovered in the great principle or axiom “that Empire follows the Balance of Property.”  The troubles and confusions In England for the last few ages were to be attributed, he thought, not so much to faults in the governors or in the governed as to a change in the balance of property, dating from the reign of Henry VII., which had gradually shifted the weight of affairs from the King and Lords to the Commons.  But all could be put right by adopting a true model.  It must not be an arbitrary monarchy, or a mixed monarchy, or a mere democracy as vulgarly understood, or any other of the make-shift constitutions of the past, but something worthy of being called a Free and Equal Commonwealth, and yet conserving what was genuine and natural in rank or aristocracy.  The basis must be a systematic classification of the community in accordance with facts and needs, and the arrangements such as to give full liberty to all, while distributing power among all in such ways and proportions as to keep the balance eternally even and make factions and contests impossible.  These arrangements, as he had schemed them out, were to be very numerous and complicated, every kind of social assemblage or activity, from the most local and parochial to the most general and national, having an exact machinery provided for it; but two all-pervading principles were to be election by Ballot and rotation of Eligibility.—­Harrington’s ideal had been set forth in a thin folio volume, entitled The Commonwealth of Oceana, published in 1656, and dedicated to Cromwell.  The book was in the form of a political romance, with high-flown dialogues, and a very fantastic nomenclature for his proposed dignities and institutions, throwing the whole into the air of poetic or literary whimsy.  There was, however, an elaborate exposition of the system and process of the Ballot.  Though too fantastic for direct effect, the book had been a good deal talked of, and had procured for the author not only a considerable reputation, but also some following of disciples.  One of these, and his intimate friend, was the Republican free-thinker Henry Neville.  There had also been some criticisms by opponents, Royalist and Republican; in answer to which Harrington, in 1658, had published a second treatise, called The Prerogative of Popular Government, re-interpreting and vindicating the doctrines of the Oceana, but more in a style of direct dissertation.—­The Harringtonians were by this time pretty numerous.  Besides Neville there were perhaps six or eight of them among the Rumpers themselves.  Why, then, should there not be an effort to impregnate the “Good Old Cause,” sadly in need of new impregnation of some kind, with a few of the essential Harringtonian principles?  By Neville’s means the effort had been actually made in the Parliament.  On the 6th of July there