e for this place, it shall
suffice that I have showed you how it was in Sicily.

"My lords, upon the fabric of your provincial orb I shall not hold you;
because it is sufficiently described in the order, and I cannot believe
that you think it inferior to the way of a praetor and a quaestor. But
whereas the provincial way of the Roman Commonwealth was that whereby it
held the empire of the world, and your orbs are intended to be capable
at least of the like use, there may arise many controversies, as whether
such a course be lawful, whether it be feasible; and, seeing that the
Romans were ruined upon that point, whether it would not be to the
destruction of the commonwealth.

"For the first: if the empire of a commonwealth be an occasion to ask
whether it be lawful for a commonwealth to aspire to the empire of the
world, it is to ask whether it be lawful for it to do its duty, or to
put the world into a better condition than it was before.

"And to ask whether this be feasible, is to ask why the Oceaner, being
under the like administration of government, may not do as much with
200 men as the Roman did with 100; for comparing their commonwealths in
their rise, the difference is yet greater: now that Rome (seris avaritia
luxuriaque), through the natural thirst of her constitution, came at
length with the fulness of her provinces to burst herself, this is no
otherwise to be understood than as when a man that from his own evil
constitution had contracted the dropsy, dies with drinking, it being
apparent that in case her agrarian had held, she could never have been
thus ruined, and I have already demonstrated that your agrarian being
once poised, can never break or swerve.

"Wherefore to draw toward some conclusion of this discourse, let me
inculcate the use, by selecting a few considerations out of many. The
regard had in this place to the empire of the world appertains to a
well-ordered commonwealth, more especially for two reasons:

"1. The facility of this great enterprise, by a government of the model
proposed;

"2. The danger that you would run in the omission of such a government.

"The facility of this enterprise, upon the grounds already laid, must
needs be great, forasmuch as the empire of the world has been, both in
reason and experience, the necessary consequence of a commonwealth of
this nature only; for though it has been given to all kinds to drive at
it, since that of Athens or Lacedaemon, if the one h