"And forasmuch as sovereign power is a necessary but a
formidable creature, not unlike the powder which (as you are
soldiers) is at once your safety and your danger, being subject
to take fire against you as well as for you, how well and
securely is she, by your galaxies so collected as to be in full
force and vigor and yet so distributed that it is impossible you
should be blown up by your own magazine? Let them who will have
it, that power if it be confined cannot be sovereign, tell us,
whether our rivers do not enjoy a more secure and fruitful reign
within their proper banks, than if it were lawful for them, in
ravaging our harvests, to spill themselves? whether souls, not
confined to their peculiar bodies, do govern them any more than
those of witches in their trances? whether power, not confined to
the bounds of reason and virtue, has any other bounds than those
of vice and passion? or if vice and passion be boundless, and
reason and virtue have certain limits, on which of these thrones
holy men should anoint their sovereign? But to blow away this
dust, the sovereign power of a commonwealth is no more bounded,
that is to say straitened, than that of a monarch; but is
balanced. The eagle mounts not to her proper pitch, if she be
bounded, nor is free if she be not balanced. And lest a monarch
should think he can reach further with his sceptre, the Roman
eagle upon such a balance spread her wings from the ocean to
Euphrates. Receive the sovereign power; you have received it,
hold it fast, embrace it forever in your shining arms. The virtue
of the loadstone is not impaired or limited, but receives
strength and nourishment, by being bound in iron. And so giving
your lordships much joy, I take my leave of this tribe."

The orator descending, had the period of his speech made with