your people
to tyrants, to be shed in the defence of their yokes like water, and
so not only turn the grace of God into wantonness, but his justice into
wormwood: I say if you do thus, you are not now making a commonwealth,
but heaping coals of fire upon your own heads. A commonwealth of this
make is a minister of God upon earth, to the end that the world may be
governed with righteousness. For which cause (that I may come at length
to our present business) the orders last rehearsed are buds of
empire, such as with the blessing of God may spread the arms of your
commonwealth, like a holy asylum, to the distressed world, and give the
earth her sabbath of years, or rest from her labors, under the shadow
of your wings. It is upon this point where the writings of Machiavel,
having for the rest excelled all other authors, come as far to excel
themselves.

"Commonwealths, says he, have had three ways of propagating themselves:
One after the manner of monarchies, by imposing the yoke, which was the
way of Athens, and, toward the latter times, of Lacedaemon; another by
equal leagues, which is the way of Switzerland (I shall add of Holland,
though since his time); a third by unequal leagues, which, to the shame
of the world, was never practised, nay, nor so much as seen or minded,
by any other commonwealth but that only of Rome. They will each of them,
either for caution or imitation, be worthy to be well weighed, which
is the proper work of this place. Athens and Lacedaemon have been the
occasion of great scandal to the world, in two, or at least one of two
regards: the first, their emulation, which involved Greece in perpetual
wars; the second, their way of propagation, which by imposing yokes upon
others, was plainly contradictory to their own principles.

"For the first: governments, be they of what kind soever, if they be
planted too close, are like trees, that impatient in their growth to
have it hindered, eat out one another. It was not unknown to these in
speculation, or, if you read the story of Agesilaus, in action, that
either of them with 30,000 men might have mastered the East; and
certainly, if the one had not stood in the other's light, Alexander had
come too late to that end, which was the means (and would be if they
were to live again) of ruin, at least to one of them; wherefore with any
man that understands the nature of government this is excusable. So
it was between Oceana and Marpesia; so it is between Fran