9) no time or place is appointed for its meeting.
Moreover, powerful citizens in this dominion are less to be feared. For
where several cities enjoy liberty, it is not enough for him, who is
making ready his way to dominion, to seize one city, in order to hold
dominion over the rest. And, lastly, liberty under this dominion is
common to more. For where one city reigns alone, there the advantage of
the rest is only so far considered, as suits that reigning city.
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1. So the text: but the court of justice is not described till the
thirty-seventh and following sections of Chap. VIII.
2. Livy, "Hist.," Bk. xxi. Chaps. VI. and following.
3. A.D. 1672. William Henry, Prince of Orange, afterwards William III.
of England, was made Statholder by a popular insurrection, consequent on
the invasion of the French.
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CHAPTER X.
OF ARISTOCRACY. CONCLUSION.
HAVING explained and made proof of the foundations of both kinds of
aristocracy, it remains to inquire whether by reason of any fault they
are liable to be dissolved or changed into another form. The primary
cause, by which dominions of this kind are dissolved, is that, which
that most acute Florentine [1] observes in his "Discourses on Livy" (Bk.
iii. Chap. I.), namely, that like a human body, "a dominion has daily
added to it something that at some time or other needs to be remedied."
And so, he says, it is necessary for something occasionally to occur, to
bring back the dominion to that first principle, on which it was in the
beginning established.
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