For, neither by reason nor by experience is it impossible that a commonwealth should be immortal; seeing the people being the materials, never die; and the form, which is motion, must, without opposition, be endless. The bowl which is thrown from your hand, if there be no rub, no impediment, shall never cease: for which cause the glorious luminaries that are the bowls of God, were once thrown forever; and next these, those of Venice. But certainly, my lords, whatever these great examples may have shown us, we are the first that have shown to the world a commonwealth established in her rise upon fifty such towers, and so garrisoned as are the tribes of Oceana, containing 100,000 elders upon the annual list, and yet but an outguard; besides her marching armies to be equal in the discipline, and in the number of her youth. “And forasmuch as sovereign power is a necessary but a formidable creature, not unlike the powder which (as you are soldiers) is at once your safety and your danger, being subject to take fire against you as well as for you, how well and securely is she, by your galaxies so collected as to be in full force and vigor and yet so distributed that it is impossible you should be blown up by your own magazine? Let them who will have it, that power if it be confined cannot be sovereign, tell us, whether our rivers do not enjoy a more secure and fruitful reign within their proper banks, than if it were lawful for them, in ravaging our harvests, to spill themselves? whether souls, not confined to their peculiar bodies, do govern them any more than those of witches in their trances? whether power, not confined to the bounds of reason and virtue, has any other bounds than those of vice and passion? or if vice and passion be boundless, and reason and virtue have certain limits, on which of these thrones holy men should anoint their sovereign? But to blow away this dust, the sovereign power of a commonwealth is no more bounded, that is to say straitened, than that of a monarch; but is balanced. The eagle mounts not to her proper pitch, if she be bounded, nor is free if she be not balanced. And lest a monarch should think he can reach further with his sceptre, the Roman eagle upon such a balance spread her wings from the ocean to Euphrates. Receive the sovereign power; you have received it, hold it fast, embrace it forever in your shining arms. The virtue of the loadstone is not impaired or limited, but receives strength and nourishment, by being bound in iron. And so giving your lordships much joy, I take my leave of this tribe.” The orator descending, had the period of his speech made with a vast applause and exultation of the whole tribe, attending him for that night to his quarter, as the phylarch with some commanded troops did the next day to the frontiers of the tribe, where leave was taken on both sides with more tears than grief.