ess proof against that
of a friend. So that if your suffrage be barefaced, I dare say you shall
not have one fair cast in twenty. But whatever a man's fortune be at the
box, he neither knows whom to thank, nor whom to challenge. Wherefore
(that my lord may have a charitable opinion of the choice affection
which I confess to have, above all other beauties, for that of
incomparable Venice) there is in this way of suffrage no less than a
demonstration that it is the most pure, and the purity of the suffrage
in a popular government is the health, if not the life of it, seeing
the soul is not otherwise breathed into the sovereign power than by the
suffrage of the people. Wherefore no wonder if Postellus be of opinion
that this use of the ball is the very same with that of the bean in
Athens, or that others, by the text concerning Eldad and Medad, derive
it from the Commonwealth of Israel. There is another thing, though not
so material to us, that my lord will excuse me if I be not willing to
yield, which is, that Venice subsists only by her situation. It is true
that a man in time of war may be more secure from his enemies by being
in a citadel, but not from his diseases; wherefore the first cause, if
he lives long, is his good constitution, without which his citadel were
to little purpose, and it is not otherwise with Venice."

With this speech of the Archon I conclude the proof of the agrarian and
the ballot, being the fundamental laws of this commonwealth, and come
now from the centre to the circumferences or orbs, whereof some have
been already shown; as how the parishes annually pour themselves into
the hundreds, the hundreds into the tribes, and the tribes into the
galaxies; the annual galaxy of every tribe consisting of two knights and
seven deputies, whereof the knights constitute the Senate; the deputies,
the prerogative tribe, commonly called the people; and the Senate and
people constitute the sovereign power or Parliament of Oceana. Whereof
to show what the Parliament is, I must first open the Senate, and then
the prerogative tribe.

To begin with the Senate, of which (as a man is differently represented
by a picture drawer and by an anatomist) I shall first discover the
face or aspect, and then the parts, with the use of them. Every Monday
morning in the summer at seven, and in the winter at eight, the great
bell in the clock-house at the Pantheon begins, and continues ringing
for the space of one hour; in whic