old
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.

"Why then are we mistaken, as if we intended not equal advantages in our
commonwealth to either sex, because we would not have women's fortunes
consist in that metal which exposes them to cutpurses? If a man cuts my
purse I may have him by the heels or by the neck for it; whereas a man
may cut a woman's purse, and have her for his pains in fetters. How
brutish, and much more than brutish, is that commonwealth which prefers
the earth before the fruits of the womb? If the people be her treasure,
the staff by which she is sustained and comforted, with what justice can
she suffer them, by whom she is most enriched, to be for that cause the
most impoverished? And yet we see the gifts of God, and the bounties of
heaven in fruitful families, through this wretched custom of marrying
for money, become their insupportable grief and poverty. Nor falls this
so heavy upon the lower sort, being better able to shi