He glances, indeed, at the possibility of an "Annual Democracy," i.e.a future succession of annual Parliaments, or at least of annual Plebiscites for electing the Government.

But he rather dismisses that possibility from his calculations; and moreover, even had he entertained it farther, we know that the Parliaments or Plebiscites he would have allowed would not have been "full and free," but only guarded representations of the "well-affected" of the community,--to wit, the Commonwealth's-men.
But the Constitution to which he looks forward with most confidence, and which he ventures to think might answer all the purposes of a perfect democracy, is one that should consist of two perpetual or life aristocracies at the centre,--one a civil aristocracy in the form of a largish Council of State, the other a military aristocracy composed of the great Army Officers,--these two aristocracies to be pledged to each other by oath, and sworn also to the two great principles of Liberty of Conscience and resistance to any attempt at Single Person sovereignty.

What communication between the Central Government so constituted and the body of the People might be necessary for the free play of opinion might be sufficiently kept up, he hints, by the machinery of County Committees.

The entire scheme may seem strange to those whose theory of a Republic refuses the very imagination of an aristocracy or of perpetuity of power in the same hands; but both, notions, and especially that of perpetuity of power in the same hands, had been growing on Milton, and were not inconsistent with _his_ theory of a Republic.

Nor was his present scheme, with all its strangeness, the least practical of the many "models" that theorists were putting forth.