Mere association was not enough; I needed to give them a suitable form of government. I hesitated in my choice of system; many of the current forms seemed to me adequate, some even excellent, but they all had the disadvantage of already existing. Let me explain. Any current form of government would expose them to comparisons that might be used to belittle them. I needed either to find a brand-new system, or to reintroduce one that had long since been abandoned. Naturally, I chose the latter, and nothing seemed more fitting than a republic in the Venetian mold; I even adopted the same epithet. This obsolete system, which was, in general terms, unlike any other current system of government, had the added advantage of all complicated mechanisms, namely, it would put my young society’s political skills to the test.

There was another motive behind my choice. Among the various electoral methods once used in the Venice of old was the bag and ball, which is how the sons of the nobility were initiated into matters of state. Balls bearing the candidates’ names were placed in the bag, and every year a certain number were taken out, with the chosen few being deemed suitable for public service. Such a system will provoke laughter among experts in electoral suffrage, but that is not the case with me. For it precludes the follies of passion, the errors of ineptitude, and the commingling of corruption and greed. This was not my only reason for choosing it; I felt that a community so skilled in the spinning of webs would find the use of the electoral bag easy to adapt to, indeed almost second nature.

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.