a sort as you cannot afterwards
control at your pleasure; while should you keep them few and unwarlike,
to the end that you may govern them easily, you will be unable, should
you extend your dominions, to preserve them, and will become so
contemptible as to be the prey of any who attack you. For which reason
in all our deliberations we ought to consider where we are likely to
encounter least inconvenience, and accept that as the course to be
preferred, since we shall never find any line of action entirely free
from disadvantage.

Rome might, therefore, following the example of Sparta, have created a
king for life and a senate of limited numbers, but desiring to become a
great empire, she could not, like Sparta, have restricted the number
of her citizens. So that to have created a king for life and a limited
senate had been of little service to her.

Were any one, therefore, about to found a wholly new republic, he would
have to consider whether he desired it to increase as Rome did in
territory and dominion, or to continue within narrow limits. In the
former case he would have to shape its constitution as nearly as
possible on the pattern of the Roman, leaving room for dissensions and
popular tumults, for without a great and warlike population no republic
can ever increase, or increasing maintain itself. In the second case he
might give his republic a constitution like that of Venice or Sparta;
but since extension is the ruin of such republics, the legislator would
have to provide in every possible way against the State which he had
founded making any additions to its territories. For these, when
superimposed upon a feeble republic, are sure to be fatal to it: as we
see to have been the case with Sparta and Venice, the former of which,
after subjugating nearly all Greece, on sustaining a trifling reverse,
betrayed the insufficiency of her foundations, for when, after the
revolt of Thebes under Pelopidas, other cities also rebelled, the
Spartan kingdom was utterly overthrown. Venice in like manner, after
gaining possession of a great portion of Italy (most of it not by her
arms but by her wealth and subtlety), when her strength was put to the
proof, lost all in one pitched battle.

I can well believe, then, that to found a republic which shall long
endure, the best plan may be to give it internal institutions like those
of Sparta or Venice; placing it in a naturally strong situation, and so
fortifying it that none can