th, 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. Whereas the
people, taken apart, are but so many private interests; but if you take
them together, they are the public interest.

"The public interest of a commonwealth, as has been shown, is nearest
that of mankind, and that of mankind is right reason; but with
aristocracy (whose reason or interest, when they are all together,
as appeared by the patricians, is but that of a party) it is quite
contrary: for as, taken apart, they are far wiser than the people
considered in that manner, so, being put together, they are such fools,
who by deposing the people, as did those of Rome, will saw off the
branch whereupon they sit, or rather destroy the root of their own
greatness. Wherefore Machiavel, following Aristotle, and yet going
before him, may well assert, 'that the people are wiser and more
constant in their resolutions than a prince:' which is the prerogative
of popular government for wisdom. And hence it is that the prerogative
of your commonwealth, as for wisdom so for power, is in the people,
which (though I am not ignorant that the Roman prerogative was so
called a proerogando, because their suffrage was first asked) gives the
denomination to your prerogative tribe."

The elections, whether annual or triennial, being shown by the
twenty-second, that which comes in the next place to be considered is--

The twenty-third order, "Showing the power, function, and manner of
proceeding of the prerogative tribe.

"The power or function of the prerogative is of two parts: the one of
result, in w