well judged or not,
is a question on which much might be said. The concession as to blood,
however, was made under necessity, and as I have observed on another
occasion, the same necessity which obtained in Rome, will be found to
obtain in every other city which desires to achieve the results which
Rome achieved. For you cannot subject men to hardships unless you hold
out rewards, nor can you without danger deprive them of those rewards
whereof you have held out hopes. It was consequently necessary to
extend, betimes, to the commons the hope of obtaining the consulship, on
which hope they fed themselves for a while, without actually realizing
it. But afterwards the hope alone was not enough, and it had to be
satisfied. For while cities which do not employ men of plebeian birth in
any of those undertakings wherein glory is to be gained, as we have seen
was the case with Venice, may treat these men as they please, those
other cities which desire to do as Rome did, cannot make this
distinction. And if there is to be no distinction in respect of blood,
nothing can be pleaded for a distinction in respect of age. On the
contrary, that distinction must of necessity cease to be observed. For
where a young man is appointed to a post which requires the prudence
which are is supposed to bring, it must be, since the choice rests with
the people, that he is thus advanced in consideration of some noble
action which he has performed; but when a young man is of such
excellence as to have made a name for himself by some signal
achievement, it were much to the detriment of his city were it unable at
once to make use of him, but had to wait until he had grown old, and had
lost, with youth, that alacrity and vigour by which his country might
have profited; as Rome profited by the services of Valerius Corvinus,
of Scipio, of Pompey, and of many others who triumphed while yet very
young.

BOOK II.

* * * * *

PREFACE.

Men do always, but not always with reason, commend the past and condemn
the present, and are so much the partisans of what has been, as not
merely to cry up those times which are known to them only from the
records left by historians, but also, when they grow old, to extol the
days in which they remember their youth to have been spent. And although
this preference of theirs be in most instances a mistaken one, I can see
that there are many causes to account for it; chief of which I take