"The Senate having appointed their proposers, shall require of the tribunes a muster of the people at a set time and place:
and the tribunes or any two of them having mustered the people accordingly, the proposers shall propose the sense or decree of the Senate by clauses to the people. And that which is proposed by the authority of the Senate, and resolved by the command of the people, is the law of Oceana." To this order, implicitly containing the sum very near of the whole civil part of the commonwealth, my Lord Archon spoke thus in council:
"MY DEAR LORDS:
"There is a saying, that a man must cut his coat according to his cloth. When I consider what God has allowed or furnished to our present work, I am amazed. You would have a popular government; he has weighed it to you in the present balance, as Imay say, to a drachm; you have no more to do but to fix it. For the superstructures of such a government they require a good aristocracy: and you have, or have had a nobility or gentry the best studied, and the best writers, at least next that of Italy, in the whole world; nor have they been inferior, when so exercised, in the leading of armies. But the people are the main body of a commonwealth; show me from the treasuries of the snow (as it is in Job) to the burning zone a people whose shoulder so universally and so exactly fits the corselet. Nevertheless, it were convenient to be well provided with auxiliaries. There is Marpesia, through her fruitfulness, inexhaustible of men, and men through her barrenness not only enured to hardship, but in your arms. It may be said that Venice, excepting only that she takes not in the people, is the most incomparable situation of a commonwealth. You are Venice, taking in your people and your auxiliaries too. My lords, the children of Israel were makers of brick before they were builders of a commonwealth; but our brick is made, our mortar tempered, the cedars of Lebanon are hewed and squared to our hands. Has this been the work of man? Or is it in man to withstand this work? 'Shall he that contends with the Almighty instruct him? He that reproves God, let him answer it.'
For our parts, everything is so laid that when we come to have use of it, it is the next at hand; and unless we can conceive that God and nature do anything in vain, there is no more for us to do but to despatch. The piece which we have reached to us in the foregoing orders, is the aristocracy. Athens, as has been shown, was plainly lost through the want of a good aristocracy.
"But the sufficiency of an aristocracy goes demonstrably upon the hand of the nobility or gentry; for that the politics can be mastered without study, or that the people can have leisure to study, is a vain imagination; and what kind of aristocracy divines and lawyers would make, let their incurable running upon their own narrow bias and their perpetual invectives against Machiavel (though in some places justly reprovable, yet the only politician, and incomparable patron of the people) serve for instruction. I will stand no more to the judgment of lawyers and divines in this work, than to that of so many other tradesmen;but if this model chances to wander abroad, I recommend it to the Roman speculativi (the most complete gentlemen of this age) for their censure; or with my Lord Epimonus his leave, send 300 or 400 copies to your agent at Venice to be presented to the magistrates there; and when they have considered them, to be proposed to the debate of the Senate, the most competent judges under heaven, who, though they have great affairs, will not refuse to return you the oracle of their ballot. The councillors of princes I will not trust; they are but journeymen. The wisdom of these later times in princes' affairs (says Verulamius) is rather fine deliveries and shiftings of dangers when they be near, than solid and grounded courses to keep them off. Their councillors do not derive their proceedings from any sound root of government that may contain the demonstration, and assure the success of them, but are expedient-mongers, givers of themselves to help a lame dog over a stile; else how comes it to pass that the fame of Cardinal Richelieu has been like thunder, whereof we hear the noise, but can make no demonstration of the reason? But to return: if neither the people, nor divines and lawyers, can be the aristocracy of a nation, there remains only the nobility; in which style, to avoid further repetition, I shall understand the gentry also, as the French do by the word noblesse.
"Now to treat of the nobility in such sort as may be less obnoxious to mistake, it will be convenient, and answerable to the present occasion, that I divide my discourse into four parts:
"The first treating of nobility, and the kinds of it;"The second, of their capacity of the Senate;"The third. of the divers kinds of senates;
"The fourth, of the Senate, according to the foregoing orders.
"Nobility may be defined divers ways; for it is either ancient riches, or ancient virtue, or a title conferred by a prince or a commonwealth.
