“It is affirmed by Cicero, in his oration for Flaccus, that the commonwealths of Greece were all shaken or ruined by the intemperance of their Comitia, or assemblies of the people. The truth is, if good heed in this point be not taken, a commonwealth will have bad legs. But all the world knows he should have excepted Lacedaemon, where the people, as has been shown by the oracle, had no power at all of debate, nor (till after Lysander, whose avarice opened a gulf that was not long ere it swallowed up his country) came it ever to be exercised by them. Whence that commonwealth stood longest and firmest of any other but this, in our days, of Venice; which, having underlaid herself with the like institution, owes a great, if not the greater, part of her steadiness to the same principle; the great Council, which is with her the people, by the authority of my Lord Epimonus, never speaking a word. Nor shall any commonwealth, where the people in their political capacity is talkative, ever see half the days of one of these, but, being carried away by vainglorious men (that, as Overbury says, void more than they drink), swim down the stream, as did Athens, the most prating of these dames, when that same ranting fellow Alcibiades fell a-demagoguing for the Silician War. “But whereas debate, by the authority and experience of Lacedaemon and Venice, is not to be committed to the people in a well-ordered government, it may be said that the order specified is but a slight bar in a matter of like danger; for so much as an oath, if there be no recourse upon the breach of it, is a weak tie for such hands as have the sword in them, wherefore what should hinder the people of Oceana, if they happen not to regard an oath from assuming debate, and making themselves as much an anarchy as those of Athens? To which I answer, Take the common sort in a private capacity, and, except they be injured, you shall find them to have a bashfulness in the presence of the better sort, or wiser men, acknowledging their abilities by attention, and accounting it no mean honor to receive respect from them; but if they be injured by them, they hate them, and the more for being wise or great, because that makes it the greater injury. Nor refrain they in this case from any kind of intemperance of speech, if of action. It is no otherwise with a people in their political capacity; you shall never find that they have assumed debate for itself, but for something else. Wherefore in Lacedaemon where there was, and in Venice where there is, nothing else for which they should assume it, they have never shown so much as an inclination to it.