for he holds the Commonwealth of Rome to have consisted of one
assembly, whereas it consisted of the Senate and the people; that
they were not upon covenant, whereas every law enacted by them
was a covenant between them; that the one assembly was made
sovereign, whereas the people, who only were sovereign, were such
from the beginning, as appears by the ancient style of their
covenants or laws -- "The Senate has resolved, the people have
decreed," that a council being made sovereign, cannot be made
such upon conditions, whereas the Decemvirs being a council that
was made sovereign, was made such upon conditions; that all
conditions or covenants making a sovereign being made, are void;
whence it must follow that, the Decemviri being made, were ever
after the lawful government of Rome, and that it was unlawful for
the Commonwealth of Rome to depose the Decemvirs; as also that
Cicero, if he wrote otherwise out of his commonwealth, did not
write out of nature. But to come to others that see more of this
balance.
You have Aristotle full of it in divers places, especially
where he says, that "immoderate wealth, as where one man or the
few have greater possessions than the equality or the frame of
the commonwealth will bear, is an occasion of sedition, which
ends for the greater part in monarchy and that for this cause the
ostracism has been received in divers places, as in Argos and
Athens. But that it were better to prevent the growth in the
beginning, than, when it has got head, to seek the remedy of such
an evil."
Machiavel has missed it very narrowly and more dangerously
for not fully perceiving that if a commonwealth be galled by the
gentry it is by their overbalance, he speaks of the gentry as
hostile to popular governments, and of popular governments as
hostile to the gentry; and makes us believe that the people in
such are so enraged against them, that where they meet a
gentleman they kill him: which can never be proved by any one
example, unless in civil war, seeing that even in Switzerland the
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