noun
definition
The well-being of a community.
definition
The entirety of a (secular) society, a polity, a state.
definition
Republic. Often capitalized, as Commonwealth.
Examples of commonwealths in a Sentence
The state rejected decisively the overtures made by Virginia in 1866, looking towards a reunion of the commonwealths.
Of free commonwealths there now survived only Venice, which, together with Spain, achieved for Europe the victory of Lepanto in 1573; Genoa, which, after the ineffectual Fieschi revolution in 1547, abode beneath the rule of the great Doria family, and held a feeble sway in Corsica; and the two insignificant republics of Lucca and San Marino.
But this has often been the case with the high magistracies of commonwealths whose constitutions were purely democratic.
From this purest type of nobility, as seen in the aristocratic commonwealths, we may pass to nobility as seen in states of greater extent - that is, for the most part in monarchies.
We have seen how much this takes away from the true notion of nobility as understood in the aristocratic commonwealths.
In modern commonwealths, above all, they have been thought to be essentially inconsistent with republican institutions.
The truth of the matter is rather that the circumstances of most modern commonwealths have been unfavourable to the preservation, and still more to the growth, of privileged bodies.
The best history is Rufus King, Ohio; First Fruits of the Ordinance of 1787 (Boston and New York, 1888), in the "American Commonwealths" series.
The best history of the state is George P. Garrison's Texas (Boston and New York, 1903), in the American Commonwealths series, but its treatment of the period since 1845 is too brief.
The wrestling-ground was thus opened for the two barbarian commonwealths.
The regno, as it was called by the Italians, constituted a state apart, differing in social institutions, foreign relations, and type of home government, from the commonwealths and tyrannies of upper Italy.
Avignon, at a distance from the party strife and somewhat parochial politics of the Italian commonwealths, impressed his mind with an ideal of civility raised far above provincial prejudices.
There were Florentines and Lombards, Guelfs and Ghibellines; but even Dante had scarcely conceived of Italy as a nation, independent of the empire, inclusive of her several component commonwealths.
Their chief occupation was the cultivation of the shares (KAilpot) of the Dorian aristocracy, but they lived in households of their own and were considered as subjects rather of the Cretan commonwealths than of private men.
The peculiar topographical conditions made the three sections of the state almost separate commonwealths, and demand for better means of communication was insistent.