Excerpt from Harrington and His OceanaMY attention was drawn to the ideas of Harrington when I was studying the history of toleration in the Stuart period. It appeared to me that his in¿u ence in England and in her colonies, both at his own time and since, deserved a fuller examination than it had yet received. My tenure of the Allen Scholarship in 1911 enabled me to make some researches both in England and America, which I have brought together in the following essay. I have attempted in the first place to give some account of Harrington's political ideas, describing their origin, their history, and their subsequent in¿uence on two centuries of English political thought in the second place, to trace a con nection, which has often been surmised but never established, between Oceana and the political institu tions of America, and finally to discuss the revival of Harrington's chief theories in the constitutions of revolutionary France. In this way I hope incidentally to have given a new illustration of the connection between political theory and practice, and to have shown afresh the essential unity of the three great revolutions of modern Europe.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.