“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. But he that
has a cow upon the common, and earns his shilling by the day at his
labor, has twice as much already as this would come to for his share;
because if the land were thus divided, there would be nobody to set him
on work. So my Lord Epimonus’s footman, who costs him thrice as much as
one of these could thus get, would certainly lose by his bargain. What
should we speak of those innumerable trades whereupon men live, not only
better than others upon good shares of lands, but become also purchasers
of greater estates? Is not this the demonstration which my lord meant,
that the revenue of industry in a nation, at least in this, is three
or four-fold greater than that of the mere rent? If the people then
obstruct industry, they obstruct their own livelihood; but if they
make a war, they obstruct industry. Take the bread out of the people’s
mouths, as did the Roman patricians, and you are sure enough of a war,
in which case they may be levellers; but our agrarian causes their
industry to flow with milk and honey. It will be owned that this is
true, if the people were given to understand their own happiness; but
where is it they do that? Let me reply with the like question, where
do they not? They do not know their happiness it should seem in France,
Spain, and Italy; but teach them what it is, and try whose sense is the
truer.
“As to the late wars in Germany, it has been affirmed to me there, that
the princes could never make the people to take arms while they had
bread, and have therefore suffered countries now and then to be wasted
that they might get soldiers. This you will find to be the certain pulse
and temper of the people; and if they have been already proved to be the
most wise and constant order of a government, why should we think
(when no man can produce one example of the common soldiery in an army
mutinying because they had not captains’ pay) that the prerogative
should jolt the heads of the Senate together because these have the
better salaries, when it must be as evident to the people in a nation,
as to the soldiery in an army, that it is no more possible their
emoluments of this kind should be afforded by any commonwealth in the
world to be made equal with those of the Senate, than that the common
soldiers should be equal with the captains? It is enough for the common
soldier that his virtue may bring him to be a captain, and more to the
prerogative, that each of them is nearer to be a senator.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account