Wherefore every commonwealth in its place having been opened by due method -- that is, first, by the people; secondly, by the Senate; and, thirdly, by the magistracy-the Council upon mature debate took such results or orders out of each, and out of every part of each of them, as upon opening the same they thought fit;which being put from time to time in writing by the clerk or secretary, there remained no more in the conclusion, than putting the orders so taken together, to view and examine them with a diligent eye, that it might be clearly discovered whether they did interfere, or could anywise come to interfere or jostle one with the other. For as such orders jostling or coming to jostle one another are the certain dissolution of the commonwealth, so, taken upon the proof of like experience, and neither jostling nor showing which way they can possibly come to jostle one another, they make a perfect and (for aught that in human prudence can be foreseen) an immortal commonwealth.
And such was the art whereby my Lord Archon (taking council of the Commonwealth of Israel, as of Moses; and of the rest of the commonwealths, as of Jethro) framed the model of the Commonwealth of Oceana.
PART III
THE MODEL OF THE COMMONWEALTH OF OCEANA
WHEREAS my Lord Archon, being from Moses and Lycurgus the first legislator that hitherto is found in history to have introduced or erected an entire commonwealth at once, happened, like them also, to be more intent upon putting the same into execution or action, than into writing; by which means the model came to be promulgated or published with more brevity and less illustration than are necessary for their understanding who have not been acquainted with the whole proceedings of the Council of legislators, and of the prytans, where it was asserted and cleared from all objections and doubts: to the end that I may supply what was wanting in the promulgated epitome to a more full and perfect narrative of the whole, I shall rather take the commonwealth practically; and as it has now given an account of itself in some years' revolutions (as Dicearchus is said to have done that of Lacedaemon, first transcribed by his hand some three or four hundred years after the institution), yet not omitting to add for proof to every order such debates and speeches of the legislators in their Council, or at least such parts of them as may best discover the reason of the government; nor such ways and means as were used in the institution or rise of the building, not to be so well conceived, without some knowledge given of the engines wherewithal the mighty weight was moved. But through the entire omission of the Council of legislators or workmen that squared every stone to this structure in the quarries of ancient prudence, the proof of the first part of this discourse will be lame, except I insert, as well for illustration as to avoid frequent repetition, three remarkable testimonies in this place.
The first is taken out of the Commonwealth of Israel: "So Moses hearkened to the voice of Jethro, his father-in-law, and did all that he had said. And Moses chose able men out of all Israel, and made them heads over the people;" tribunes, as it is in the vulgar Latin; or phylarchs, that is, princes of the tribes, sitting upon twelve thrones, and judging the twelve tribes of Israel; and next to these he chose rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens, which were the steps and rise of this commonwealth from its foundation or root to its proper elevation or accomplishment in the Sanhedrim, and the congregation, already opened in the preliminaries.
The second is taken out of Lacedaemon, as Lycurgus (for the greater impression of his institutions upon the minds of his citizens) pretended to have received the model of that commonwealth from the oracle of Apollo at Delphos, the words whereof are thus recorded by Plutarch in the life of that famous legislator: "When thou shalt have divided the people into tribes (which were six) and oboe (which were five in every tribe), thou shalt constitute the Senate, consisting, with the two Kings, of thirty councillors, who, according as occasion requires, shall cause the congregation to be assembled between the bridge and the river Gnacion, where the Senate shall propose to the people, and dismiss them without suffering them to debate." The oboe were lineages into which every tribe was divided, and in each tribe there was another division containing all those of the same that were of military age, which being called the mora, was subdivided into troops and companies that were kept in perpetual discipline under the command of a magistrate called the polemarch.
