In 1659, Harrington published an abridgment of his Oceana as “The Art of Lawgiving,” in three books. Other pieces followed, in which he defended or developed his opinions. He again urged them when Cromwell’s Commonwealth was in its death-throes. Then he fell back upon argument at nightly meetings of a Rota Club which met in the New Palace Yard, Westminster. Milton’s old pupil, Cyriac Skinner, was one of its members; and its elections were by ballot, with rotation in the tenure of all offices. 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 no 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 world? I beseech you, my lord, did Alexander hang up Aristotle? did he molest him? Livy, for a commonwealth, is one of the fullest authors; did not he write under Augustus Caesar? Did Caesar hang up Livy? did he molest him? Machiavel, what a commonwealthsman was he! but he wrote under the Medici when they were princes in Florence: did they hang up Machiavel, or did they molest him? I have done no otherwise than as the greatest politicians: the King will do no otherwise than as the greatest princes.”