It is plain, then, that the most perfect political community must be amongst those who are in the middle rank, and those states are best instituted wherein these are a larger and more respectable part, if possible, than both the other; or, if that cannot be, at least than either of them separate; so that being thrown into the balance it may prevent either scale from
preponderating.
All the time that he had been speaking, the dubious-looking men with carbines and dirty slouch hats had been gathering silently in such
preponderating numbers that even Muscari was compelled to recognize his sally with the sword as hopeless.
Until lately, my reasons for considering the Pampaean formation to be an estuary deposit were, its general appearance, its position at the mouth of the existing great river the Plata, and the presence of so many bones of terrestrial quadrupeds: but now Professor Ehrenberg has had the kindness to examine for me a little of the red earth, taken from low down in the deposit, close to the skeletons of the mastodon, and he finds in it many infusoria, partly salt-water and partly fresh-water forms, with the latter rather
preponderating; and therefore, as he remarks, the water must have been brackish.
But it had a
preponderating tendency, when considered, to become fainter.
what was right, a
preponderating balance of authority would normally be
If the natural order of things be reversed, and a
preponderating power be conferred on the Kafir population, the inevitable result will be that the white man, deprived of the power of a wise and cautious administration, and even of the means of self protection, will be driven from the land, and the fruits of industry, and the hopes of civilization will perish together; while to the colored population, civil war and mutual self destruction will certainly and terribly ensue....
of dwelling exclusively on the intellectual conditions of human conduct and omitting to give proper attention to the emotional and volitional as essentially cooperating or
preponderating in the complex meaning of ethical attributes" (399-400).
James Burnham, in Congress and the American Tradition, said the framers "believed that in a republican and representative governmental system the
preponderating share of power was held and exercised by the legislature" (1959, 92).