dships 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. Moreover, I am
deceived if, upon due consideration, it does not fetch your tribes, with
greater equality and ease to themselves and to the government, from the
frontiers of Marpesia, than Rome ever brought any one of hers out of her
pomoeria, or the nearest parts of her adjoining territories. To this you
may add, that whereas a commonweal