being also of tenures in nature
so different, that as there is no experience that an agrarian was ever
introduced in such a case, so there is no appearance how or reason
why it should: but that which is against reason and experience is
impossible."

The case of my Lord Philautus was the most concerned in the whole
nation; for he had four younger brothers, his father being yet living,
to whom he was heir of L10,000 a year. Wherefore being a man both of
good parts and esteem, his words wrought both upon men's reason and
passions, and had borne a stroke at the head of the business, if my Lord
Archon had not interposed the buckler in this oration:

"MY LORDS, THE LEGISLATORS OF OCEANA:

"My Lord Philautus has made a thing which is easy to seem hard; if the
thanks were due to his eloquence, it would be worthy of less praise
than that he owes it to his merit, and the love he has most deservedly
purchased of all men: nor is it rationally to be feared that he who is
so much beforehand in his private, should be in arrear in his public,
capacity. Wherefore, my lord's tenderness throughout his speech arising
from no other principle than his solicitude lest the agrarian should
be hurtful to his country, it is no less than my duty to give the best
satisfaction I am able to so good a patriot, taking every one of his
doubts in the order proposed. And,

"First, whereas my lord, upon observation of the modern commonwealths,
is of opinion that an agrarian is not necessary: it must be confessed
that at the first sight of them there is some appearance favoring
his assertion, but upon accidents of no precedent to us. For the
commonwealths of Switzerland and Holland, I mean of those leagues, being
situated in countries not alluring the inhabitants to wantonness, but
obliging them to universal industry, have an implicit agrarian in the
nature of them: and being not obnoxious to a growing nobility (which,
as long as their former monarchies had spread the wing over them, could
either not at all be hatched, or was soon broken) are of no example to
us, whose experience in this point has been to the contrary. But what if
even in these governments there be indeed an explicit agrarian? For when
the law commands an equal or near equal distribution of a man's estate
in land among his children, as it is done in those countries, a nobility
cannot grow; and so there needs no agrarian, or rather there is one.
And for the growth of the nobility in Veni