Prince Bentrik was incredulous.

"Great Satan, aren't yours?" Prince Trask was equally surprised.
"Then your democracy's a farce, and the people are only free on
sufferance. If their ballots aren't secured by arms, they're
worthless. Who has the arms on your planet?"

"Why, the Government."

"You mean the King?"

Prince Bentrik was shocked. Certainly not; horrid idea. That would
be ... why, it would be _despotism_! Besides, the King wasn't the
Government, at all; the Government ruled in the King's name. There
was the Assembly; the Chamber of Representatives, and the Chamber of
Delegates. The people elected the Representatives, and the
Representatives elected the Delegates, and the Delegates elected the
Chancellor. Then, there was the Prime Minister; he was appointed by
the King, but the King had to appoint him from the party holding the
most seats in the Chamber of Representatives, and he appointed the
Ministers, who handled the executive work of the Government, only
their subordinates in the different Ministries were career-officials
who were selected by competitive examination for the bottom jobs and
promoted up the bureaucratic ladder from there.

This left Trask wondering if the Mardukan constitution hadn't been
devised by Goldberg, the legendary Old Terran inventor who always
did everything the hard way. It also left him wondering just how in
Gehenna the Government of Marduk ever got anything done.

Maybe it didn't. Maybe that was what saved Marduk from having a real
despotism.

"Well, what prevents the Government from enslaving the people?
The people can't; you just told me that they aren't armed, and
the Government is."

He continued, pausing now and then for breath, to catalogue every
tyranny he had ever heard of, from those practiced by the Terran
Federation before the Big War to those practiced at Eglonsby on
Amaterasu by Pedrosan Pedro. A few of the very mildest were pushing
the nobles and people of Gram to revolt against Angus I.

"And in the end," he finished, "the Government would be the only
property owner and the only employer on the planet, and everybody
else would be slaves, working at assigned tasks, wearing
Government-issued clothing and eating Government food, their
children educated as the Government prescribes and trained for jobs
selected for them by the Government, never reading a book or seeing
a play or thinking a thought that the Government had not
approved...."

Most of the M