My proposal was accepted. “The Most Serene Republic” struck them as a magnificent title: high-sounding and generous, and suitably aggrandizing of their work as a collective.

I would not say, gentlemen, that my work has reached perfection, nor that it will do so in the near future. My pupils are not Campanella’s solarians or More’s utopians; they are a new people, who cannot in a single bound o’erleap our most venerable nations. And time is not a workman who willingly hands his tools to another; it will, though, serve far better than any paper theories, which look good on paper, but prove lame in practice. What I will say is that, notwithstanding the uncertainties of the age, the spiders continue to make progress, having at their disposal some of the virtues which I believe essential for a state to endure. One of those virtues, as I have already mentioned and as I will now demonstrate, is perseverance, the long-suffering patience of Penelope.

In effect, ever since they first grasped that the electoral act was the fundamental basis of public life, they set out to exercise it with the utmost punctiliousness. Weaving the bag was itself a national undertaking. It was five inches long, three inches wide, and woven from the finest threads into a solid, sturdy piece of work. To make it, ten ladies of the very highest rank were selected by acclamation, and given the title “mothers of the republic” along with various other privileges and perquisites. A real masterpiece, of that you can be sure. The electoral process itself is quite simple. The names of the candidates, each of whom must fulfill certain conditions, are inscribed on the balls by a public official known as the Inscriptions Officer. On election day, the balls are placed in the bag and then picked out by the Withdrawals Officer, until the required number of candidates has been chosen. What was simply an initiation ceremony in the Venice of old, here serves to fill all public positions.

At first the election passed off without incident. But soon afterward, one of the legislators declared that the election had been tainted, because the bag contained two balls each inscribed with the name of the same candidate. The assembly verified the truth of the allegation, and declared that the bag would henceforth be only two inches wide, not three, thus restricting the bag’s capacity and limiting (which was as good as eliminating) the scope for fraud. However, in the following election, it transpired that the name of one of the candidates had not been inscribed on the relevant ball; whether this was due to carelessness or willful omission on the part of the public official is not known. The official insisted that he had no recollection of seeing the illustrious candidate, but nobly added that it was not impossible that he had been given the name, in which case it had not been a matter of deliberate exclusion, but of forgetfulness on his part. Faced with so ineluctable a psychological phenomenon as forgetfulness, the assembly could not bring itself to punish the official; however, in the belief that the narrowness of the bag could give rise to nefarious exclusions, it revoked the previous law and restored the bag to its full three inches.