hand of his great ancestors; with reverence to whom, I may say, there has not been one of them would have disputed his place with a Roman consul. “My lord, do not break my heart; the nobility shall go to no other ploughs than those which we call our consuls. But, says he, it having been so with Lacedaemon, that neither the city nor the citizens were capable of increase, a blow was given by that agrarian, which ruined both. And what are we concerned with that agrarian, or that blow while our citizens and our city (and that by our agrarian) are both capable of increase? The Spartan, if he made a conquest, had no citizens to hold it; the Oceaner will have enow. The Spartan could have no trade; the Oceaner may have all. The agrarian in Laconia, that it might bind on knapsacks, forbidding all other arts but that of war, could not make an army of above 30,000 citizens. The agrarian in Oceana, without interruption of traffic, provides us in the fifth part of the youth an annual source or fresh spring of 100,000, besides our provincial auxiliaries, out of which to draw marching armies; and as many elders, not feeble, but men most of them in the flower of their age, and in arms for the defence of our territories. The agrarian in Laconia banished money, this multiplies it; that allowed a matter of twenty or thirty acres to a man, this 2,000 or 3,000; there is no comparison between them. And yet I differ so much from my lord, or his opinion that the agrarian was the ruin of Lacedaemon, that I hold it no less than demonstrable to have been her main support. For if, banishing all other diversions, it could not make an army of above 30,000, then, letting in all other diversions, it must have broken that army. Wherefore Lysander, bringing in the golden spoils of Athens, irrevocably ruined that commonwealth; and is a warning to us, that in giving encouragement to industry, we also remember that covetousness is the root of all evil. And our agrarian can never be the cause of those seditions threatened by my lord, but is the proper cure of them, as Lucan notes well in the state of Rome before the civil wars, which happened through the want of such an antidote.