The club was put an end to at the Restoration, when Harrington
retired to his study and amused himself by putting his " System of
Politics" into the form of " Aphorisms."

On December 28, 1661, James Harrington, then fifty years old,
was arrested and carried to the Tower as a traitor. His Aphorisms
were on his desk, and as they also were to be carried off, he asked
only that they might first be stitched together in their proper order.
Why he was arrested, he was not told. One of his sisters pleaded in
vain to the King. He was falsely accused of complicity in an
imaginary plot, of which nothing could be made by its
investigators. No heed was paid to the frank denials of a man of
the sincerest nature, who never had concealed his thoughts or
actions. "Why," he was asked, at his first examination by Lord
Lauderdale, who was one of his kinsmen, "why did he, as a private
man, meddle with politics? What had a private man to do with
government?" His answer was: "My lord, there is not any public
person, nor any magistrate, that has written on politics, worth a
button. All they that have been excellent in this way have been
private men, as private men, my lord, as myself. There is Plato,
there is Aristotle, there is Livy, there is Machiavel. My lord, I can
sum up Aristotle's ' Politics in a very few words: he says, there is
the Barbarous Monarchy-such a one where the people have 110
votes in making the laws; he says, there is the Heroic
Monarchy-such a one where the people have their votes in making
the laws; and then, he says, there is Democracy, and affirms that a
man cannot be said to have liberty but in a democracy only." Lord
Lauderdale here showing impatience, Harrington added: "I say
Aristotle says so. I have not said so much. And under what prince
was it? Was it not under Alexander, the greatest prince then in the