weight. But Rome perished through her native inequality, which how it
inveterated the bosoms of the Senate and the people each against other,
and even to death, has been shown at large.

"Look well to it, my lords, for if there be a contradiction or
inequality in your commonwealth, it must fall; but if it has neither of
these, it has no principle of mortality. Do not think me impudent; if
this be truth, I shall commit a gross indiscretion in concealing it.
Sure I am that Machiavel is for the immortality of a commonwealth upon
far weaker principles. 'If a commonwealth,' says he, 'were so happy
as to be provided often with men, that, when she is swerving from
her principles, should reduce her to her institution, she would be
immortal.' But a commonwealth, as we have demonstrated, swerves not from
her principles, but by and through her institution; if she brought no
bias into the world with her, her course for any internal cause must
be straightforward, as we see is that of Venice. She cannot turn to the
right hand nor to the left, but by some rub, which is not an internal,
but external, cause: against such she can be no way fortified but
through her situation, as is Venice, or through her militia, as was
Rome, by which examples a commonwealth may be secure of those also.
Think me not vain, for I cannot conceal my opinion here; a commonwealth
that is rightly instituted can never swerve, nor one that is not
rightly instituted be secured from swerving by reduction to her
first principles; wherefore it is no less apparent in this place that
Machiavel understood not a commonwealth as to the whole piece, than
where having told you that a tribune, or any other citizen of Rome,
might propose a law to the people, and debate it with them, he adds,
'this order was good while the people were good; but when the people
became evil, it became most pernicious.' As if this order (through
which, with the like, the people most apparently became evil) could ever
have been good, or that the people or the commonwealth could ever have
become good, by being reduced to such principles as were the original of
their evil.

"The disease of Rome was, as has been shown, from the native inequality
of her balance, and no otherwise from the empire of the world, than as,
this falling into one scale, that of the nobility (an evil in such a
fabric inevitable) kicked out the people. Wherefore a man that could
have made her to throw away the empire of the w