public sword, to which he reduces all manner and matter of
government; as, where he affirms this opinion (that any monarch
receives his power by covenant; that is to say, upon conditions)"
to proceed from the not understanding this easy truth, that
covenants being but words and breath, have no power to oblige,
contain, constrain, or protect any man, but what they have from
the public sword." But as he said of the law, that without this
sword it is but paper, so he might have thought of this sword,
that without a hand it is but cold iron. The hand which holds
this sword is the militia of a nation; and the militia of a
nation is either an army in the field, or ready for the field
upon occasion. But an army is a beast that has a great belly, and
must be fed: wherefore this will come to what pastures you have,
and what pastures you have will come to the balance of property,
without which the public sword is but a name or mere spitfrog.
Wherefore, to set that which Leviathan says of arms and of
contracts a little straighter, he that can graze this beast with
the great belly, as the Turk does his Timariots, may well deride
him that imagines he received his power by covenant, or is
obliged to any such toy. It being in this case only that
covenants are but words and breath. But if the property of the
nobility, stocked with their tenants and retainers, be the
pasture of that beast, the ox knows his master's crib; and it is
impossible for a king in such a constitution to reign otherwise
than by covenant; or if he break it, it is words that come to
blows.
"But," says he, "when an assembly of men is made sovereign,
then no man imagines any such covenant to have part in the
institution." But what was that by Publicola of appeal to the
people, or that whereby the people had their tribunes? "Fie,"
says he, "nobody is so dull as to say that the people of Rome
made a covenant with the Romans, to hold the sovereignty on such
or such conditions, which, not performed, the Romans might depose
the Roman people." In which there be several remarkable things;
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