The crowd pressed more closely around the foot of the stage, and Peterchen, assuming a didactic air, resumed his discourse.

“The object of all authority is to find the means of its own support,” continued the bailiff; “for unless it can exist, it must fall to the ground; and you all are sufficiently schooled to know that when a thing becomes of indifferent value, it loses most of its consideration.  Thus government is established in order that it may protect itself; since without this power it could not remain a government, and there is not a man existing who is not ready to admit that even a bad government is better than none.  But ours is particularly a good government, its greatest care on all occasions being to make itself respected, and he who respects himself is certain to have esteem in the eyes of others.  Without this security we should become like the unbridled steed, or the victims of anarchy and confusion, ay, and damnable heresies in religion.  Thus you see my friends, your choice lies between the government of Berne, or no government at all; for when only two things exist, by taking one away the number is reduced half, and as the great canton will keep its own share of the institutions, by taking half away, Vaud is left as naked as my hand.  Ask yourselves if you have any government but this?  You know you have not.  Were you quit of Berne, therefore, you clearly would have none at all.  Officer, you have a sword at your side, which is a good type of our authority; draw it and hold it up, that all may see it.  You perceive, my friends, that the officer hath a sword; but that he hath only one sword.  Lay it at thy feet, officer.  You perceive, friends, that having but one sword, and laying that sword aside, he no longer hath a sword at all!  That weapon represents our authority, which laid aside becomes no authority, leaving us with an unarmed hand.”

This happy comparison drew a murmur of applause; the proposition of Peterchen having most of the properties of a popular theory, being deficient in neither a bold assertion, a brief exposition, nor a practical illustration.  The latter in particular was long afterwards spoken of in Vaud, as an exposition little short of the well-known judgment of Solomon, who had resorted to the same keen-edged weapon in order to solve a point almost as knotty as this settled by the bailiff.  When the approbation had a little subsided, the warmed Peterchen continued his discourse, which possessed the random and generalized logic of most of the dissertations that are uttered in the interests of things as they are, without paying any particular deference to things as they should be.