Wherefore Lysander, bringing in the golden spoils of Athens,
irrevocably ruined that commonwealth; and is a warning to us,
that in giving encouragement to industry, we also remember that
covetousness is the root of all evil. And our agrarian can never
be the cause of those seditions threatened by my lord, but is the
proper cure of them, as Lucan notes well in the state of Rome
before the civil wars, which happened through the want of such an
antidote.

"Why then are we mistaken, as if we intended not equal
advantages in our commonwealth to either sex, because we would
not have women's fortunes consist in that metal which exposes
them to cutpurses? If a man cuts my purse I may have him by the
heels or by the neck for it; whereas a man may cut a woman's
purse, and have her for his pains in fetters. How brutish, and
much more than brutish, is that commonwealth which prefers the
earth before the fruits of the womb? If the people be her
treasure, the staff by which she is sustained and comforted, with
what justice can she suffer them, by whom she is most enriched,
to be for that cause the most impoverished? And yet we see the
gifts of God, and the bounties of heaven in fruitful families,
through this wretched custom of marrying for money, become their
insupportable grief and poverty. Nor falls this so heavy upon the
lower sort, being better able to shift for themselves, as upon
the nobility or gentry. For what avails it in this case, from
whence their veins have derived their blood; while they shall see
the tallow of a chandler sooner converted into that beauty which
is required in a bride? I appeal, whether my Lord Philautus or
myself be the advocate of nobility; against which, in the case
proposed by me, there would be nothing to hold the balance. And