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.
So a tribe is the third division of land occasioned by the third
collection of the people, whose functions proper to that place are
contained in the five foregoing orders.
The institution of the commonwealth was such as needed those props and
scaffolds which may have troubled the reader; but I shall here take them
away, and come to the constitution which stands by itself, and yields a
clearer prospect.
The motions, by what has been already shown, are spherical; and
spherical motions have their proper centre, for which cause (ere I
proceed further) it will be necessary, for the better understanding
of the whole, that I discover the centre whereupon the motions of this
commonwealth are formed.
The centre, or basis of every government, is no other than the
fundamental laws of the same.
Fundamental laws are such as state what it is that a man, and what the
means may call his own, that is to say, property; be whereby a man may
enjoy his own, that is to say, protection. The first is also called
dominion, and the second empire or sovereign power, whereof this (as
has been shown) is the natural product of the former, for such as is the
balance of dominion in a nation, such is the nature of its empire.
Wherefore the fundamental laws of Oceana, or the centre of this
commonwealth, are the agrarian and the ballot: the agrarian by the
balance of dominion preserving equality in the root; and the ballot by
an equal rotation conveying it into the branch, or exercise of sovereign
power, as, to begin with the former, appears by--
The thirteenth order, "Constituting the agrarian laws of Oceana,
Marpesia, and Panopea, whereby it is ordained, first, for all such lands
as are lying and being within the proper territories of Oceana, that
every man who is at present possessed, or shall hereafter be possessed,
of an estate in land exceeding the revenue of L2,000 a year, and having
more than one son, shall leave his lands either equally divided among
them, in case the lands amount to above L2,000 a year to each, or so
near equally, in case they come under, that the greater part or portion
of the same remaining to the eldest
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