there was
equal poverty; and the plebeians were less ambitious, because the honors
or magistracies of the city could extend but to a few and were not
communicable to the people, nor did the nobility by using them ill ever
give them a desire to participate of the same. This proceeded from the
kings, whose principality, being placed in the midst of the nobility,
had no greater means whereby to support itself than to shield the people
from all injury; whence the people, not fearing empire, desired it not;
and so all occasion of enmity between the Senate and the people was
taken away. But this union happened especially from two causes: the one
that the inhabitants of Lacedaemon being few, could be governed by the
few; the other, that, not receiving strangers into their commonwealth,
they did not corrupt it, nor increase it to such a proportion as was not
governable by the few.

"'Venice has not divided with her plebeians, but all are called
gentlemen that be in administration of the government; for which
government she is more beholden to chance than the wisdom of her
law-makers; for many retiring to those islands, where that city is now
built, from the inundations of barbarians that overwhelmed the Roman
Empire, when they were increased to such a number that to live together
it was necessary to have laws, they ordained a form of government,
whereby assembling often in council upon affairs, and finding their
number sufficient for government, they put a bar upon all such as
repairing afterward to their city should become inhabitants, excluding
them from participation of power. Whence they that were included in the
administration had right, and they that were excluded, coming afterward,
and being received upon no other conditions to be inhabitants, had no
wrong, and therefore had no occasion, nor (being never trusted with
arms) any means to be tumultuous. Wherefore this commonwealth might very
well maintain itself in tranquillity.

"'These things considered, it is plain that the Roman legislators, to
have introduced a quiet state, must have done one of these two things:
either shut out strangers, as the Lacedemonians; or, as the Venetians,
not allowed the people to bear arms. But they did neither. By which
means the people, having power and increase, were in perpetual tumult.
Nor is this to be helped in a commonwealth for increase, seeing if Rome
had cut off the occasion of her tumults, she must have cut off the means
of h