"Why, the people are the Government. The people would not legislate themselves into slavery."
He wished Otto Harkaman were there. All he knew of history was the little he had gotten from reading some of Harkaman's books, and the long, rambling conversations aboard ship in hyperspace or in the evenings at Rivington. But Harkaman, he was sure, could have furnished hundreds of instances, on scores of planets and over ten centuries of time, in which people had done exactly that and hadn't known what they were doing, even after it was too late.
"They have something about like that on Aton," one of the Mardukan officers said.
"Oh, Aton; that's a dictatorship, pure and simple. That Planetary Nationalist gang got into control fifty years ago, during the crisis after the war with Baldur...."
"They were voted into power by the people, weren't they?"
"Yes; they were," Prince Bentrik said gravely. "It was an emergency measure, and they were given emergency powers. Once they were in, they made the emergency permanent."
"That couldn't happen on Marduk!" a young nobleman declared.
"It could if Zaspar Makann's party wins control of the Assembly at the next election," somebody else said.
"Oh, then Marduk's safe! The sun'll go nova first," one of the junior Royal Navy officers said.