'This melancholy extends beyond human beings to plants and creatures with senses. I do not mean those things that belong to Saturn and are melancholy by nature—lead and similar minerals; plants such as rue, cypress, and hellebore itself, of which Agrippa writes; fishes, birds, and beasts, hares, rabbits, dormice, owls, bats, and night birds. I mean the melancholy brought about by circumstances, which is observable in them all. Move a plant and it will waste away. This is particularly noticeable in date palms, as you can read at length in Constantine’s book on husbandry; so too is the antagonism between vine and cabbage, or vine and oil.

'Put a bird in a cage and it will die of despondency; put a beast in a pen, or take away its young or companions, and see what effect this has. Who does not observe these common passions in creatures with senses: fear, sorrow, and so forth? Dogs are more subject to this malady than any others, so much so that some maintain they dream as people do and go mad through the violence of melancholy. I could tell many stories of dogs that have died of grief or wasted away after losing their masters, but such stories are common in every author.

Kingdoms, provinces, and political bodies likewise have feeling and are subject to this disease, as Botero has argued at length in his political writings. “Just as various changes arise from humours in human bodies,” he says, “so a commonwealth has many diseases, arising in different ways from various disorders.” You can readily recognise them by their particular symptoms.

For wherever you see people civil, obedient to God and their rulers, sensible, peaceable and quiet, rich, fortunate, and flourishing; living in peace, unity, and harmony; a country well cultivated, with many handsomely built and populous cities, “where the inhabitants thrive,” as old Cato said—the people neat, polished, and well kept—“where they live well and happily,” which our political writers make the chief end of a commonwealth;

and which Aristotle, in his Politics, book 3, chapter 4, calls “the common good,” and Polybius, book 6, “a desirable and choice condition”: that country is free from melancholy. So it was in Italy under Augustus; so it is now in China and in many other flourishing kingdoms of Europe.

But wherever you see widespread discontent, public grievances, complaints, poverty, barbarism, begging, plagues, wars, rebellions, sedition, mutinies, disputes, idleness, excess, and self-indulgence; land lying untilled and waste, full of bogs, fens, deserts, and so on; decaying cities, mean and impoverished towns, depopulated villages, and people dirty, ugly, and uncivilised: that kingdom, that country, must be discontented and melancholy. Its body is sick and needs reform.

This cannot properly be achieved until the causes of these maladies are removed. They commonly arise from the inhabitants’ own failings or from some disadvantage of circumstance: being situated in an unfavourable climate, too far north, infertile, in a barren region such as the desert of Libya or the deserts of Arabia; in places without water, such as those of Lop and Belgian in Asia; or in unhealthy air, as at Alexandretta, Bantam, Pisa, Durazzo, San Juan de Ulúa, and elsewhere.

Or they are in danger of repeated flooding by the sea, as in many parts of the Low Countries and elsewhere; or they lie near hostile neighbours, as the Hungarians do beside the Turks, or the Podolians beside the Tatars. Almost any countries sharing such borders live in constant fear and are often left desolate by hostile raids.

Cities are likewise laid waste by wars, fires, plagues, floods, wild beasts, declining trade, blocked harbours, and the sea’s violence. Antwerp can bear witness in recent times, Syracuse in ancient times, Brindisi in Italy, and Rye and Dover here at home; so can many cities that today fear the sea’s fury and struggle against it, as the Venetians do, at immense expense.

But the commonest maladies arise from the people themselves: first, when religion and the worship of God are neglected, changed by innovations, or altered; where people neither fear God nor obey their ruler; where atheism, self-indulgence, sacrilege, simony, and all such impieties are freely practised, that country cannot prosper. When Abraham came to Gerar and saw a wicked land, he said that surely there was no fear of God in that place.

Cyprian Echovius, a Spanish writer on places, praises Borcino above all other Spanish cities: “There was no beggar there, no poor person, and so on, but everyone was rich and prosperous.” He gives the reason: “They were more religious than their neighbours.” Why was Israel so often plundered by its enemies and carried into captivity, if not for idolatry, neglect of God’s word, and sacrilege—even for the fault of a single Achan? What, then, should we expect, with our multitudes of Achans, church robbers, and patrons who sell church appointments? How can people hope to flourish when they neglect their religious duties and live, for the most part, in self-indulgence?

Other public grievances harm the political body as a whole: changes in laws and customs, violations of privileges, widespread oppression, sedition, and so on, as Aristotle, Bodin, Botero, Junius, Arniscus, and others observe. I will only touch on the chief ones. “Inability to govern,” “disorder,” confusion, bad government: these arise from unskilled, idle, grasping, greedy, unjust, reckless, or tyrannical magistrates—from fools, ignoramuses, children, the proud, wilful, biased, and imprudent; oppressors, scatterbrains, and tyrants, unable or unfit to administer such offices.

Many noble cities and flourishing kingdoms are laid waste in this way. The whole body groans beneath such heads, and all its members must suffer—as those fine provinces in Asia Minor and elsewhere groan today beneath the burden of Turkish government, and the vast kingdoms of Muscovy and Russia beneath a tyrannical duke.

Who ever heard of more civilised, wealthy, and populous countries than Greece and Asia Minor, “abounding in every kind of wealth, in inhabitants, strength, power, splendour, and magnificence”? Or that marvel among countries, the Holy Land, which in so small an area could sustain so many towns and cities and supply so many fighting men? Egypt, another paradise, is now barbarous, deserted, and almost waste under the despotic government of an imperious Turk: “It is crushed beneath an intolerable yoke of slavery,” as one writer says.