THE SAME (continued)
The moment the people is legitimately assembled as a sovereign body,
the jurisdiction of the government wholly lapses, the executive power
is suspended, and the person of the meanest citizen is as sacred and
inviolable as that of the first magistrate; for in the presence of
the person represented, representatives no longer exist. Most of the
tumults that arose in the comitia at Rome were due to ignorance or
neglect of this rule. The consuls were in them merely the presidents of
the people; the tribunes were mere speakers;[1] the senate was nothing
at all.
These intervals of suspension, during which the prince recognises or
ought to recognise an actual superior, have always been viewed by him
with alarm; and these assemblies of the people, which are the aegis
of the body politic and the curb on the government, have at all times
been the horror of rulers: who therefore never spare pains, objections,
difficulties, and promises, to stop the citizens from having them. When
the citizens are greedy, cowardly, and pusillanimous, and love ease
more than liberty, they do not long hold out against the redoubled
efforts of the government; and thus, as the resisting force incessantly
grows, the sovereign authority ends by disappearing, and most cities
fall and perish before their time.
But between the sovereign authority and arbitrary government there
sometimes intervenes a mean power of which something must be said.
[1] In nearly the same sense as this word has in the English
Parliament. The similarity of these functions would have brought the
consuls and the tribunes into conflict, even had all jurisdiction been
suspended.