also of the consuls, censors, aediles, tribunes, praetors,
quaestors, and other magistrates, executing.
Venice consists of the Senate, or pregati, proposing, and
sometimes resolving too, of the great Council or Assembly of the
people, in whom the result is constitutively; as also of the
doge, the signory, the censors, the dieci, the quazancies, and
other magistrates, executing.
The proceeding of the Commonwealths of Switzerland and
Holland is of a like nature, though after a more obscure manner;
for the sovereignties, whether cantons, provinces, or cities,
which are the people, send their deputies, commissioned and
instructed by themselves (wherein they reserve the result in
their own power), to the provincial or general convention, or
Senate, where the deputies debate, but have no other power of
result than what was conferred upon them by the people, or is
further conferred by the same upon further occasion. And for the
executive part they have magistrates or judges in every canton,
province, or city, besides those which are more public, and
relate to the league, as for adjusting controversies between one
canton, province, or city and another, or the like between such
persons as are not of the same canton, province, or city.
But that we may observe a little further how the heathen
politicians have written, not only out of nature, but as it were
out of Scripture: as in the Commonwealth of Israel, God is said
to have been king, so the commonwealth where the law is king, is
said by Aristotle to be "the kingdom of God." And where by the
lusts or passions of men a power is set above that of the law
deriving from reason, which is the dictate of God, God in that
sense is rejected or deposed that he should not reign over them,
as he was in Israel. And yet Leviathan will have it that "by
reading of these Greek and Latin [he might as well in this sense
have said Hebrew] authors, young men, and all others that are
unprovided of the antidote of solid reason, receiving a strong
and delightful impression of the great exploits of war achieved
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