The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors familiar with the history of republics realized that the appointment of representa tives by election owed more to feudal than to republican tradition. On this point too, Harrington, Montesquieu, and Rousseau were in agreement. Commenting on the use of lot to choose the prerogative century in Rome, Harrington wrote: "But the Gothic prudence, in the policy of the third state [stage of history], runs altogether upon the collection of a representative by the suffrage of the people
[election].