se.

"A people, when they are reduced to misery and despair, become their
own politicians, as certain beasts, when they are sick, become their own
physicians, and are carried by a natural instinct to the desire of such
herbs as are their proper cure; but the people, for the greater part,
are beneath the beasts in the use of them. Thus the people of Rome,
though in their misery they had recourse by instinct, as it were, to the
two main fundamentals of a commonwealth, participation of magistracy and
the agrarian, did but taste and spit at them, not (which is necessary in
physic) drink down the potion, and in that their healths. For when they
had obtained participation of magistracy it was but lamely, not to a
full and equal rotation in all elections; nor did they greatly regard it
in what they had got. And when they had attained to the agrarian, they
neglected it so far as to suffer the law to grow obsolete; but if you do
not take the due dose of your medicines (as there be slight tastes which
a man may have of philosophy that incline to atheism) it may chance to
be poison, there being a like taste of the politics that inclines to
confusion, as appears in the institution of the Roman tribunes, by which
magistracy and no more the people were so far from attaining to peace,
that they in getting but so much, got but heads for an eternal feud;
whereas if they had attained in perfection either to the agrarian, they
had introduced the equality and calm of Lacedaemon, or to rotation, and
they had introduced that of Venice: and so there could have been no more
enmity between the Senate and the people of Rome than there was between
those orders in Lacedaemon, or is now in Venice. Wherefore Machiavel
seems to me, in attributing the peace of Venice more to her luck than
her prudence, of the whole stable to have saddled the wrong horse;
for though Rome in her military part could beat it better, beyond
all comparison, upon the sounding hoof, Venice for the civil part has
plainly had the wings of Pegasus.

"The whole question then will come upon this point, whether the people
of Rome could have obtained these orders? And first, to say that they
could not have obtained them without altering the commonwealth, is no
argument; seeing neither could they, without altering the commonwealth,
have obtained their tribunes, which nevertheless were obtained. And if
a man considers the posture that the people were in when they obtained
their tribu