r the like has happened, must have been
unequal.

Fourthly, that it is the government, which, if it has been anything
near equal, was never seditious; or let him show me what sedition has
happened in Lacedaemon or Venice.

Fifthly, that it is the government, which, attaining to perfect
equality, has such a libration in the frame of it, that no man living
can show which way any man or men, in or under it, can contract any such
interest or power as should be able to disturb the commonwealth with
sedition, wherefore an equal commonwealth is that only which is without
flaw and contains in it the full perfection of government. But to
return.

By what has been shown in reason and experience, it may appear, that
though commonwealths in general be governments of the senate proposing,
the people resolving, and the magistracy executing, yet some are not so
good at these orders as others, through some impediment or defect in
the frame, balance, or capacity of them, according to which they are of
divers kinds.

The first division of them is into such as are single, as Israel,
Athens, Lacedaemon, etc.; and such as are by leagues, as those of the
Achaeans, AEtolians, Lycians, Switz, and Hollanders.

The second (being Machiavel's) is into such as are for preservation, as
Lacedaemon and Venice, and such as are for increase, as Athens and
Rome; in which I can see no more than that the former takes in no more
citizens than are necessary for defence, and the latter so many as are
capable of increase.

The third division (unseen hitherto) is into equal and Unequal, and this
is the main point, especially as to domestic peace and tranquillity; for
to make a commonwealth unequal, is to divide it into parties, which sets
them at perpetual variance, the one party endeavoring to preserve their
eminence and inequality and the other to attain to equality; whence
the people of Rome derived their perpetual strife with the nobility and
Senate. But in an equal commonwealth there can be no more strife than
there can be overbalance in equal weights; wherefore the Commonwealth
of Venice, being that which of all others is the most equal in the
constitution, is that wherein there never happened any strife between
the Senate and the people.

An equal commonwealth is such a one as is equal both in the balance or
foundation, and in the superstructure; that is to say, in her agrarian
law and in her rotation.

An equal agrarian is a perpetual law, es