gentry are not only safe, but in honor. But the balance, as I
have laid it down, though unseen by Machiavel, is that which
interprets him, and that which he confirms by his judgment in
many others as well as in this place, where he concludes, "That
he who will go about to make a commonwealth where there be many
gentlemen, unless he first destroys them, undertakes an
impossibility. And that he who goes about to introduce monarchy
where the condition of the people is equal, shall never bring it
to pass, unless he cull out such of them as are the most
turbulent and ambitious, and make them gentlemen or noblemen, not
in name but in effect; that is, by enriching them with lands,
castles, and treasures, that may gain them power among the rest,
and bring in the rest to dependence upon themselves, to the end
that, they maintaining their ambition by the prince, the prince
may maintain his power by them."

Wherefore, as in this place I agree with Machiavel, that a
nobility or gentry, overbalancing a popular government, is the
utter bane and destruction of it; so I shall show in another,
that a nobility or gentry, in a popular government, not
overbalancing it, is the very life and soul of it.

By what has been said, it should seem that we may lay aside
further disputes of the public sword, or of the right of the
militia; which, be the government what it will, or let it change
how it can, is inseparable from the overbalance in dominion: nor,
if otherwise stated by the law or custom (as in the Commonwealth
of Rome, where the people having the sword, the nobility came to
have the overbalance), avails it to any other end than
destruction. For as a building swaying from the foundation must