commonwealths, is of opinion that an agrarian is not necessary:
it must be confessed that at the first sight of them there is
some appearance favoring his assertion, but upon accidents of no
precedent to us. For the commonwealths of Switzerland and
Holland, I mean of those leagues, being situated in countries not
alluring the inhabitants to wantonness, but obliging them to
universal industry, have an implicit agrarian in the nature of
them: and being not obnoxious to a growing nobility (which, as
long as their former monarchies had spread the wing over them,
could either not at all be hatched, or was soon broken) are of no
example to us, whose experience in this point has been to the
contrary. But what if even in these governments there be indeed
an explicit agrarian? For when the law commands an equal or near
equal distribution of a man's estate in land among his children,
as it is done in those countries, a nobility cannot grow; and so
there needs no agrarian, or rather there is one. And for the
growth of the nobility in Venice (if so it be, for Machiavel
observes in that republic, as a cause of it, a great mediocrity
of estates) it is not a point that she is to fear, but might
study, seeing she consists of nothing else but nobility, by
which, whatever their estates suck from the people, especially if
it comes equally, is digested into the better blood of that
commonwealth, which is all, or the greatest, benefit they can
have by accumulation. For how unequal soever you will have them
to be in their incomes, they have officers of the pomp, to bring
them equal in expenses, or at least in the ostentation or show of
them. And so unless the advantage of an estate consists more in
the measure than in the use of it, the authority of Venice does
but enforce our agrarian; nor shall a man evade or elude the
prudence of it, by the authority of any other commonwealth.