"I have held your lordships long, but upon an account of no small importance, which I can now sum up in these few words:
where there is a liquorishness in a popular assembly to debate, it proceeds not from the constitution of the people, but of the commonwealth. Now that your commonwealth is of such a constitution as is naturally free from this kind of intemperance, is that which, to make good, I must divide the remainder of my discourse into two parts:
"The first, showing the several constitutions of the assemblies of the people in other commonwealths;"The second, comparing our assembly of the people with theirs; and showing how it excludes the inconveniences and embraces the conveniences of them all.
"In the beginning of the first part I must take notice, that among the popular errors of our days it is no small one that men imagine the ancient governments of this kind to have consisted for the most part of one city that is, of one town; whereas by what we have learned of my 'lords that owned them, it appears that there was not any considerable one of such a Constitution but Carthage, till this in our days of Venice.
"For to begin with Israel, it consisted of the twelve tribes, locally spread or quartered throughout the whole territory, and these being called together by trumpets, constituted the Church or assembly of the people. The vastness of this weight, as also the slowness thence unavoidable, became a great cause (as has been shown at large by my Lord Phosphorus) of the breaking that commonwealth; notwithstanding that the Temple, and those religious ceremonies for which the people were at least annually obliged to repair thither, were no small ligament of the tribes, otherwise but slightly tacked together.
"Athens consisted of four tribes, taking in the whole people, both of the city and of the territory; not so gathered by Theseus into one town, as to exclude the country, but to the end that there might be some capital of the commonwealth: though true it be, that the congregation, consisting of the inhabitants within the walls, was sufficient to all intents and purposes, without those of the country. These also being exceeding numerous, became burdensome to themselves and dangerous to the commonwealth; the more for their ill-education, as is observed by Xenophon and Polybius, who compare them to mariners that in a calm are perpetually disputing and swaggering one with another, and never lay their hands to the common tackling or safety till they be all endangered by some storm. Which caused Thucydides, when he saw this people through the purchase of their misery become so much wiser as to reduce their Comitia or assemblies to 5,000, to say in his eighth book: 'And now, at least in my time, the Athenians seem to have ordered their State aright, consisting of a moderate tempor both of the few (by which he means the Senate of the Bean)and of the many,' or the 5,000. And he does not only give you his judgment, but the best proof of it; for 'this,' says he, 'was the first thing that, after so many misfortunes past, made the city again to raise her head.' The place I would desire your lordships to note, as the first example that I find, or think is to be found, of a popular assembly by way of representative.
"Lacedaemon consisted of 30,000 citizens dispersed throughout Laconia, one of the greatest provinces in all Greece, and divided, as by some authors is probable, into six tribes. Of the whole body of these, being gathered, consisted the great Church or assembly, which had the legislative power; the little church, gathered sometimes for matters of concern within the city, consisted of the Spartans only. These happened, like that of Venice, to be good constitutions of a congregation, but from an ill-cause the infirmity of a commonwealth, which through her paucity was oligarchical.
'Wherefore, go which way you will, it should seem that without a representative of the people, your commonwealth, consisting of a whole nation, can never avoid falling either into oligarchy or confusion.
"This was seen by the Romans, whose rustic tribes, extending themselves from the river Arno to the Vulturnus, that is, from Fesulae or Florence to Capua, invented a way of representative by lots: the tribe upon which the first fell being the prerogative, and some two or three more that had the rest, the jure vocatoe.
These gave the suffrage of the commonwealth in two meetings; the prerogative at the first assembly, and the jure vocatoe at a second.
"Now to make the parallel: all the inconveniences that you have observed in these assemblies are shut out, and all the conveniences taken into your prerogative. For first, it is that for which Athens, shaking off the blame of Xenophon and Polybius, came to deserve the praise of Thucydides, a representative. And, secondly, not, as I suspect in that of Athens, and is past suspicion in this of Rome, by lot, but by suffrage, as was also the late House of Commons, by which means in your prerogatives all the tribes of Oceana are jure vocatoe; and if a man shall except against the paucity of the standing number, it is a wheel, which in the revolution of a few years turns every hand that is fit, or fits every hand that it turns to the public work.
