sions are touched, as is far oftener the case
with them than with a people.

We see, too, that in the choice of magistrates a people will choose far
more honestly than a prince; so that while you shall never persuade a
people that it is advantageous to confer dignities on the infamous and
profligate, a prince may readily, and in a thousand ways, be drawn to
do so. Again, it may be seen that a people, when once they have come to
hold a thing in abhorrence, remain for many ages of the same mind; which
we do not find happen with princes. For the truth of both of which
assertions the Roman people are my sufficient witness, who, in the
course of so many hundred years, and in so many elections of consuls
and tribunes, never made four appointments of which they had reason
to repent; and, as I have said, so detested the name of king, that no
obligation they might be under to any citizen who affected that name,
could shield him from the appointed penalty.

Further, we find that those cities wherein the government is in the
hands of the people, in a very short space of time, make marvellous
progress, far exceeding that made by cities which have been always ruled
by princes; as Rome grew after the expulsion of her kings, and Athens
after she freed herself from Pisistratus; and this we can ascribe to no
other cause than that the rule of a people is better than the rule of a
prince.

Nor would I have it thought that anything our historian may have
affirmed in the passage cited, or elsewhere, controverts these my
opinions. For if all the glories and all the defects both of peoples and
of princes be carefully weighed, it will appear that both for goodness
and for glory a people is to be preferred. And if princes surpass
peoples in the work of legislation, in shaping civil institutions, in
moulding statutes, and framing new ordinances, so far do the latter
surpass the former in maintaining what has once been established, as to
merit no less praise than they.

And to state the sum of the whole matter shortly, I say that popular
governments have endured for long periods in the same way as the
governments of princes, and that both have need to be regulated by the
laws; because the prince who can do what he pleases is a madman, and the
people which can do as it pleases is never wise. If, then, we assume
the case of a prince bound, and of a people chained down by the laws,
greater virtue will appear in the people than in the prince; whi