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
gentry are not only safe, but in honor. But the balance, as I
have laid it down, though unseen by Machiavel, is that which
interprets him, and that which he confirms by his judgment in
many others as well as in this place, where he concludes, "That
he who will go about to make a commonwealth where there be many
gentlemen, unless he first destroys them, undertakes an
impossibility.
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