In some respects it is ranked above other countries: for skilled seamen, our laborious voyages of discovery, the art of navigation, and genuine merchants. They take the prize over every other nation, even the Portuguese and the Dutch themselves: “Fearlessly,” says Botero, “ploughing the ocean in winter and summer; and two of their captains, with as much courage as good fortune, have sailed around the world.”

Besides, we have many particular blessings that our neighbours lack: the Gospel rightly preached; church discipline established; long peace and tranquillity, free from oppressive levies, foreign threats, invasions, and civil unrest; a well-cultivated country, fortified by human skill and nature; and now, happiest of all, that fortunate union of England and Scotland which our forefathers worked to achieve and longed to see. But what raises us above everyone else is a wise, learned, religious king—another Numa, a second Augustus, a true Josiah—most worthy councillors, a learned clergy, an obedient people, and so on.

Yet among the many roses grow some thistles: noxious weeds and abuses that seriously disturb the peace of this political body and dim its honour and glory. They deserve to be rooted out and reformed without delay.

The first is idleness. Because of it, we have swarms of rogues and beggars, thieves, drunkards, and discontented people—whom Lycurgus, in Plutarch, calls “diseases of the commonwealth,” the boils of the commonwealth—and many poor people in all our towns: “undistinguished cities,” as Polydore calls them, meanly built, inglorious, poor, small, few and far between, dilapidated, and sparsely inhabited.

We cannot deny that our land is fertile and full of good things. Why, then, does it not abound in cities like Italy, France, Germany, and the Low Countries? Because their policies have been different, and we are not so thrifty, careful, or industrious. Idleness is our nation’s “evil spirit.” As Botero rightly argues, a country’s fertility is not enough unless skill and industry accompany it. According to Aristotle, wealth is either natural or made by human skill: natural wealth consists of good land, rich mines, and so on; wealth made by human skill consists of manufactured goods, coins, and the like.

Many kingdoms are fertile but sparsely inhabited, such as the duchy of Piedmont in Italy, which Leandro Alberti praises so highly for its grain, wine, fruit, and so on; yet they are nowhere near as populous as less fertile countries. “England,” he says, “London alone excepted, has not a single populous city, yet it is a fertile country.”

I find 46 cities and walled towns in Alsace, a small province of Germany, 50 castles, and countless villages. No land lies idle: even rocky places and hilltops are cultivated, as Münster tells us. In Kraichgau, a small territory on the Neckar, 24 Italian miles across, I read of 20 walled towns and innumerable villages, most containing 150 houses apiece, besides castles and noblemen’s palaces.

In Thuringia in Germany, twelve miles across by their measure, I find 12 counties containing 144 cities, 2,000 villages, 144 towns, and 250 castles. In Bavaria there are 34 cities, 46 towns, and so on. Entre-Douro-e-Minho in Portugal, a small tract of land, has 1,460 parishes, 130 monasteries, and 200 bridges. Malta, a barren island, supports 20,000 inhabitants.

But above all these, I admire Lodovico Guicciardini’s accounts of the Low Countries. Holland has 26 cities and 400 large villages; Zeeland, 10 cities and 102 parishes; Brabant, 26 cities and 102 parishes; Flanders, 28 cities, 90 towns, and 1,154 villages, besides abbeys, castles, and so forth. The Low Countries generally have at least three cities for every one of ours, and theirs are far more populous and wealthy. What causes this but their industry and excellence in every kind of trade?

Their commerce is sustained by a multitude of tradespeople, so many excellent artificial waterways, and conveniently placed harbours beside which they build their cities. We have all these advantages in equal measure, or at least could have them. But the chief magnet drawing every kind of commerce and merchandise, and sustaining their present prosperity, is industry: that, rather than fertile soil, enriches them. The gold mines of Peru or New Spain cannot compare with them.

Those United Provinces have no gold or silver of their own, no wine or oil, scarcely any grain growing there, little or no timber, tin, lead, iron, silk, wool, or almost any other material or metal. Yet Hungary and Transylvania, which boast of their mines, and fertile England cannot compare with them.

I dare say boldly that neither France, Taranto, Apulia, Lombardy, nor any other part of Italy, nor Valencia in Spain, nor pleasant Andalusia—with their excellent fruit, wine, oil, and two harvests—indeed, no part of Europe is so flourishing, so rich, so populous, so full of good ships and well-built cities, or so abundant in everything people need. It is our Indies, a China in miniature, all because of industry, good government, and commerce.

Industry is a magnet that draws every good thing to it. That alone makes countries flourish and cities populous. Through the intensive cultivation that necessarily follows, it will make barren soil fertile and good, just as sheep, says Dio, improve poor pasture.

Tell me, political thinkers: why have fertile Palestine, noble Greece, Egypt, and Asia Minor declined so greatly, fallen so far from what they were, until they are mere carcasses? The soil is the same, but government has changed; the people have become slothful and idle, and their good farming, government, and industry have decayed. “The soil is not worn out or exhausted,” as Columella rightly tells Silvinus; “our idleness causes it,” and so on.

Can one believe what Aristotle in his Politics, Pausanias, Stephanus, Sophianus, and Gerbelius relate about ancient Greece? I find that 70 cities in Epirus were once overthrown by Aemilius Paulus: a fine province in former times, now left without good towns and almost without inhabitants. There were 62 cities in Macedonia in Strabo’s time. I find 30 in Laconia; now, Gerbelius says, there are scarcely that many villages.