"For if a commonwealth has been introduced at once, as those
of Israel and Lacedaemon, you are certain to find her underlaid
with this as the main foundation; nor, if she is obliged more to
fortune than prudence, has she raised her head without musing
upon this matter, as appears by that of Athens, which through her
defect in this point, says Aristotle, introduced her ostracism,
as most of the democracies of Greece. But, not to restrain a
fundamental of such latitude to any one kind of government, do we
not yet see that if there be a sole landlord of a vast territory,
he is the Turk? that if a few landlords overbalance a populous
country, they have store of servants? that if a people be in an
equal balance, they can have no lords? that no government can
otherwise be erected, than upon some one of these foundations?
that no one of these foundations (each being else apt to change
into some other) can give any security to the government, unless
it be fixed? that through the want of this fixation, potent
monarchy and commonwealths have fallen upon the heads of the
people, and accompanied their own sad ruins with vast effusions
of innocent blood? Let the fame, as was the merit of the ancient
nobility of this nation, be equal to or above what has been
already said, or can be spoken, yet have we seen not only their
glory but that of a throne, the most indulgent to and least
invasive for so many ages upon the liberty of a people that the
world has known, through the mere want of fixing her foot by a
proportionable agrarian upon her proper foundation, to have
fallen with such horror as has been a spectacle of astonishment
to the whole earth. And were it well argued from one calamity,
that we ought not to prevent another? Nor is Aristotle so good a
commonwealths man for deriding the invention of Phaleas as in