had been presented a petition from “divers well-affected persons,” to which the petitioners “might have had many thousand hands” besides their own, had they not preferred relying on the inherent strength of their case.  The answer of the House, through the Speaker, had been most gracious.  They perceived that this was a petition “without any private ends and only for public interest”; and they assured the petitioners that the business to which the petition referred, viz. the settlement of a Constitution for the Commonwealth, was one in which the House intended “to go forward.”  There is nothing in the Journals to indicate the nature of the petition; but it had been drawn up by Harrington and may be read in his Works.  It abjured, in the strongest terms, Kingship or Single-Person Sovereignty in any form, and particularly “the interest of the late King’s son”; but it represented the existing state of things as chaotic, and urged the adoption of a definite Constitution for England, the legislative part of which should consist of two Parliamentary Houses, both to be elected by the whole body of the People.  One was to contain about 300 members, and was to have the power of debating and propounding laws; the other was to be much larger, and was to pass or reject the laws so propounded.  Great stress was laid on Rotation in the elections to both.  “There cannot,” said the petitioners, “be a union of the interests of a whole nation in the Government where those that shall sometimes govern be not also sometimes in the condition of the governed”; and hence they proposed that annually a third part of each of the two Houses should wheel out of the House, not to be re-eligible for a considerable period, and their places to be taken by newly elected members.  Thus every third year the stuff of each House would be entirely changed.—­Not content with petitioning Parliament, the Harringtonians disseminated their ideas vigorously through the press. A Discourse showing that the spirit of a Parliament with a Council in the intervals is not to be trusted for a Settlement, lest it introduce Monarchy, was a pamphlet of Harrington’s, published July 28; another, published Aug. 31, was entitled Aphorisms Political, and consisted of a series of brief propositions:  e.g.  “Nature is of God,” “The Union with Scotland, as it is vulgarly discoursed of, is destructive both to the hopes of a Commonwealth and to Liberty in Scotland.”  There were to be other and still other publications, by Harrington or his disciples, through the rest of the year, including, for popular effect, a copper engraving of an Assembly in full session, watching the dropping of noble voting-balls into splendid urns.  But this was not all.  The Harringtonians set up their famous debating club, called The Rota.  “In 1659, in the beginning of Michaelmas term,” says Anthony Wood, “they had every night a meeting at the then Turk’s Head in the New Palace Yard at Westminster (the next house to the stairs where