Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 2.djvu/343



T is agreed, that in all government there is an absolute unlimited power, which naturally and originally seems to be placed in the whole body, whereever the executive part of it lies. This holds in the body natural; for wherever we place the beginning of motion, whether from the head, or the heart, or the animal spirits in general, the body moves and acts by a consent of all its parts. This unlimited power, placed fundamentally in the body of a people, is what the best legislators of all ages have endeavoured, in their several schemes or institutions of government, to deposite in such hands as would preserve the people from rapine and oppression within, as well as violence from without. Most of them seem to agree in this, that it was a trust too great to be committed to any one man or assembly, and therefore they left the right still in the whole body; but the administration or executive part, in the hands of the one, the few, or the many; into which three powers all independent bodies of men seem naturally to divide: for, by all I have read of those innumerable and petty commonwealths in Italy, Greece, and Sicily, as well as the great ones of Carthage and Rome, it seems to me, that a free Rh