Imprimis: Urns, balls, and balloting-boxes for 10,000 parishes,
the same being wooden-ware, œ20,000
Item: Provision of the like kind for a thousand hundreds
3,000
Item: Urns and balls of metal, with balloting-boxes for fifty
tribes,
2,000
Item: For erecting of fifty pavilions,
60,000
Item: Wages for four surveyors-general at œ1,000 a man
4,000
Item: Wages for the rest of the surveyors, being 1,000 at œ250 a
man
250,000
Sum Total œ339,000
This is no great matter of charge for the building of a
commonwealth, in regard that it has cost (which was pleaded by
the surveyors) as much to rig a few ships. Nevertheless that
proves not them to be honest, nor their account to be just; but
they had their money for once, though their reckoning be plainly
guilty of a crime, to cost him his neck that commits it another
time, it being impossible for a commonwealth (without an exact
provision that it be not abused in this kind) to subsist; for if
no regard should be had of the charge (though that may go deep),
yet the debauchery and corruption whereto, by negligence in
accounts, it infallibly exposes its citizens, and thereby lessens
the public faith, which is the nerve and ligament of government,
ought to be prevented. But the surveyors being despatched, the
Lord Archon was very curious in giving names to his tribes, which
having caused to be written in scrolls cast into an urn, and
presented to the councillors, each of them drew one, and was
accordingly sent to the tribe in his lot, as orators of the same,
a magistracy no otherwise instituted, than for once and pro
tempore, to the end that the council upon so great an occasion
might both congratulate with the tribes, and assist at the first
muster in some things of necessity to be differently carried from
the established administration and future course of the
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