“In this example your lordships have a donation of liberty or of Italian right to a people, by restitution to what they had formerly enjoyed; and some particular men, families or cities, according to their merit of the Romans, if not upon this, yet upon the like occasions, were gratified with Latinity.” But Philip’s share by this means did not please him, wherefore the league was broken by his son Perseus; and the Macedonians thereupon for the second time conquered by AEmilius Paulus, their King taken, and they some time after the victory summoned to the tribunal of the general; where, remembering how little hope they ought to have of pardon, they expected some dreadful sentence: when AEmilius, in the first place, declared the Macedonians to be free, in the full possession of their lands, goods, and laws, with right to elect annual magistrates, yielding and paying to the people of Rome one-half of the tribute which they were accustomed to pay to their own kings. This done he went on, making so skilful a division of the country in order to the methodizing of the people, and casting them into the form of popular government, that the Macedonians, being first surprised with the virtue of the Romans, began now to alter the scene of their admiration, that a stranger should do such things for them in their own country, and with such facility as they had never so much as once imagined to be possible. Nor was this all; for AEmilius, as if not dictating to conquered enemies, but to some well-deserving friends, gave them in the last place laws so suitable, and contrived with such care and prudence, that long use and experience (the only correctness of works of this nature) could never find a fault in them.
“In this example you have a donation of liberty, or of Italian right, to a people that had not tasted of it before, but were now taught how to use it.
“My lords, the royalists should compare what we are doing, and we what hitherto we have done for them, with this example. It is a shame that while we are boasting up ourselves above all others, we should yet be so far from imitating such examples as these, that we do not so much as understand that if government be the parent of manners, where there are no heroic virtues, there is no heroic government.
“But the Macedonians rebelling, at the name of a false Philip, the third time against the Romans, were by them judged incapable of liberty, and reduced by Metellus to a province.
“Now whereas it remains that I explain the nature of a province, I shall rather choose that of Sicily, because, having been the first which the Romans made, the descriptions of the rest relate to it.
“‘We have so received the Sicilian cities into amity,’ says Cicero, ‘that they enjoy their ancient laws; and upon no other condition than of the same obedience to the people of Rome, which they formerly yielded to their own princes or superiors.’ So the Sicilians, whereas they had been parcelled out to divers princes, and into divers states (the cause of perpetual wars, whereby, hewing one another down, they became sacrifices to the ambition of their neighbors, or of some invader), were now received at the old rate into a new protection which could hold them, and in which no enemy durst touch them; nor was it possible, as the case then stood, for the Sicilians to receive, or for the Romans to give more.
“A Roman province is defined by Sigonius as a region having provincial right. Provincial right in general was to be governed by a Roman praetor, or consul, in matters at least of state, and of the militia; and by a quaeStor, whose office it was to receive the public revenue. Provincial right in particular was different, according to the different leagues or agreements between the commonwealth, and the people reduced into a province. ‘Siculi hoc jure sunt, ut quod civis cum cive agat, domi certet suis legibus; quod siculus cum siculo non ejusdem civitatis, ut de eo proetor judices, ex P. Rupilii decreto, sortiatur. Quod privatus a populo petit, aut populus a privato, senatus ex aliqua civitate, qui judicet, datur, cui alternoe civitates rejectoe sunt. Quod vivis Romanus a siculo petit, siculus judex datur quod siculus a cive Romano, civis Romanus datur. Coeterarum rerum selecti judices ex civium Romanorum conventu proponi solent. Inter aratores et decumanos lege frumentaria, quam Hieronicam appellant, judicia fiunt.’ Because the rest would oblige me to a discourse too large for this place, it shall suffice that I have showed you how it was in Sicily.
“My lords, upon the fabric of your provincial orb I shall not hold you; because it is sufficiently described in the order, and I cannot believe that you think it inferior to the way of a praetor and a quaestor. But whereas the provincial way of the Roman Commonwealth was that whereby it held the empire of the world, and your orbs are intended to be capable at least of the like use, there may arise many controversies, as whether such a course be lawful, whether it be feasible; and, seeing that the Romans were ruined upon that point, whether it would not be to the destruction of the commonwealth.
“For the first: if the empire of a commonwealth be an occasion to ask whether it be lawful for a commonwealth to aspire to the empire of the world, it is to ask whether it be lawful for it to do its duty, or to put the world into a better condition than it was before.
“And to ask whether this be feasible, is to ask why the Oceaner, being under the like administration of government, may not do as much with 200 men as the Roman did with 100; for comparing their commonwealths in their rise, the difference is yet greater: now that Rome (seris avaritia luxuriaque), through the natural thirst of her constitution, came at length with the fulness of her provinces to burst herself, this is no otherwise to be understood than as when a man that from his own evil constitution had contracted the dropsy, dies with drinking, it being apparent that in case her agrarian had held, she could never have been thus ruined, and I have already demonstrated that your agrarian being once poised, can never break or swerve.