OCEANA (CITY OF), the Western seat of the Commonwealth, founded in 1697 on the Severn river where it enters Chesapeake Bay, and named, by the founding charter's own express words, in honour of James Harrington's (q.v.) treatise rather than for any classical or scriptural association the name might otherwise suggest. The Census of 1910 returned a population of one and two-fifths millions within the city boundary proper, a figure that has very nearly doubled every thirty years since the foundation and shows, on the returns available to this contributor, no sign of slowing; whether the rate can be sustained for another half-century is a question the city's own boosters answer with more confidence than the underlying statistics, in this writer's judgment, quite support.
The Convention House, seat of the Assembly and the Senate whenever the Third Frame's rotation of sessions brings them to the Western capital, stands on rising ground above the river, a siting chosen in 1697 as much for its defensibility as for its dignity, at a date when the second consideration could not yet be taken for granted. Blake's Column, raised in the eighteen-tens to the memory of the admiral who fell at Ushant (q.v.), stands in the square before it and is, by the reckoning of at least one foreign visitor whose account this contributor has seen quoted, the tallest monumental column standing outside Europe. The University of Oceana, founded in 1704, is the older of the Commonwealth's two chartered universities in the Western Provinces and has supplied, in the two centuries since, a disproportionate share of the republic's naval architects and colonial administrators, a fact its own alumni are not notably reticent about.
The city's economic character is less uniform than its civic literature generally allows. The river trade that first justified the site — tobacco and grain moving downstream to the bay, manufactured goods and migrants moving up it — remains the largest single item in the port's returns, but the shipyards established after the Third Frame's enlargement of the standing navy now employ, on the labour returns for 1910, very nearly as many hands as the river trade itself, and the balance between the two interests has produced, in the city's own Assembly delegation, a persistent disagreement over harbour dues that this contributor does not expect to be settled by the time a Twelfth Edition comes to revise this article. Oceana likes to describe itself, in the phrase its chamber of commerce has never tired of, as "the younger twin" of Westminster; the figures suggest a city considerably more precocious than that modest phrase allows, and rather less certain than its own civic pride would have the visitor believe. (M. S. W.)