Imprimis: Urns, balls, and balloting-boxes for 10,000 parishes,
the same being wooden-ware, £20,000
Item: Provision of the like kind for a thousand hundreds
3,000
Item: Urns and balls of metal, with balloting-boxes for fifty
tribes,
2,000
Item: For erecting of fifty pavilions,
60,000
Item: Wages for four surveyors-general at £1,000 a man
4,000
Item: Wages for the rest of the surveyors, being 1,000 at £250 a
man
250,000
Sum Total £339,000
This is no great matter of charge for the building of a commonwealth, in
regard that it has cost (which was pleaded by the surveyors) as much
to rig a few ships. Nevertheless that proves not them to be honest,
nor their account to be just; but they had their money for once, though
their reckoning be plainly guilty of a crime, to cost him his neck that
commits it another time, it being impossible for a commonwealth (without
an exact provision that it be not abused in this kind) to subsist; for
if no regard should be had of the charge (though that may go deep), yet
the debauchery and corruption whereto, by negligence in accounts, it
infallibly exposes its citizens, and thereby lessens the public faith,
which is the nerve and ligament of government, ought to be prevented.
But the surveyors being despatched, the Lord Archon was very curious in
giving names to his tribes, which having caused to be written in scrolls
cast into an urn, and presented to the councillors, each of them drew
one, and was accordingly sent to the tribe in his lot, as orators of
the same, a magistracy no otherwise instituted, than for once and pro
tempore, to the end that the council upon so great an occasion might
both congratulate with the tribes, and assist at the first muster in
some things of necessity to be differently carried from the established
administration and future course of the commonwealth.
The orators being arrived, every one as soon as might be, at the
rendezvous of his tribe, gave notice to the hundreds, and summoned the
muster which appeared for the most part upon good horses, and already
indifferently well armed; as to instance in one for all, the tribe of
Nubia, where Hermes de Caduceo, lord orator of the same, after a short
salutation and a hearty welcome, applied himself to his business, which
began with--
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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