"But that I do not think your artist which you mentioned,
whether astronomer or arithmetician, can tell me how many
barley-corns would reach to the sun, I could be content he were
called to the account, with which I shall conclude this point:
when by the way I have chid my lords the legislators, who, as if
they doubted my tackling could not hold, would leave me to flag
in a perpetual calm, but for my Lord Epimonus, who breathes now
and then into my sails and stirs the waters. A ship makes not her
way so briskly as when she is handsomely brushed by the waves,
and tumbles over those that seem to tumble against her; in which
case I have perceived in the dark that light has been struck even
out of the sea, as in this place, where my Lord Epimonus feigning
to give us a demonstration of one thing, has given it of another,
and of a better. For the people of this nation, if they amount in
each tribe to 2,000 elders and 2,000 youths upon the annual roll,
holding a fifth to the whole tribe, then the whole of a tribe,
not accounting women and children, must amount to 20,000; and so
the whole of all the tribes, being fifty, to 1,000,000.
"Now you have 10,000 parishes, and reckoning these one with
another, each at ?1,000 a year dry-rent, the rent or revenue of
the nation, as it is or might be let to farm, amounts to
?10,000,000; and ?10,000,000 in revenue divided equally to
1,000,000 of men, comes but to ?10 a year to each wherewith to
maintain himself, his wife and children.
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