And,
secondly, not, as I suspect in that of Athens, and is past
suspicion in this of Rome, by lot, but by suffrage, as was also
the late House of Commons, by which means in your prerogatives
all the tribes of Oceana are jure vocatoe; and if a man shall
except against the paucity of the standing number, it is a wheel,
which in the revolution of a few years turns every hand that is
fit, or fits every hand that it turns to the public work.
Moreover, I am deceived if, upon due consideration, it does not
fetch your tribes, with greater equality and ease to themselves
and to the government, from the frontiers of Marpesia, than Rome
ever brought any one of hers out of her pomoeria, or the nearest
parts of her adjoining territories. To this you may add, that
whereas a commonwealth, which in regard of the people is not of
facility in execution, were sure enough in this nation to be cast
off through impatience; your musters and galaxies are given to
the people, as milk to babes, whereby when they are brought up
through four days' election in a whole year (one at the parish,
one at the hundred, and two at the tribe) to their strongest
meat, it is of no harder digestion than to give their negative or
affirmative as they see cause. There be gallant men among us that
laugh at such an appeal or umpire; but I refer it whether you be
more inclining to pardon them or me, who I confess have been this
day laughing at a sober man, but without meaning him any harm,
and that is Petrus Cunaeus, where speaking of the nature of the
people, he says, 'that taking them apart, they are very simple,
but yet in their assemblies they see and know something:, and so
runs away without troubling himself with what that something is.
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