Among our towns, London alone has the appearance of a city: “Britain in miniature,” a famous centre of commerce, second to none overseas, a noble marketplace. But “she alone grows while the others decline”; and even she, in my humble judgement, is deficient in many things.

The rest, with a few exceptions, are in a sorry condition, mostly dilapidated, poor, and full of beggars. Their trades have declined; their government is neglectful or bad; their inhabitants are idle and dissolute, preferring to beg or loiter, and verge on starvation, rather than work.

I cannot deny that something can be said in defence of our cities for being less finely built, less wealthy, less closely spaced, and less populous than those in some other countries. For in earlier times this kingdom’s architectural splendour was confined to its Norman castles and religious houses. Besides the reasons Cardan gives in On Subtlety, Book 11, we lack wine and oil, their two harvests; we live in a colder climate and must therefore eat somewhat more meat, as all northern countries do. Our food supply will consequently not support so many people.

Yet we have raw materials of every kind, an open sea for trade as others do, and fine harbours. How can we excuse our negligence, our excesses and drunkenness, and all the abuses that follow? We have passed excellent laws, you will say: strict statutes, houses of correction, and so forth. To little purpose, it seems. Houses will not be enough: we need cities of correction. Our trades as a whole should be reformed and their deficiencies supplied.

Other countries have the same grievances, I admit, but that does not excuse us: shortages, defects, abuses, idle drones, riots, discord, disputes, lawsuits. Many laws have been made to suppress those countless brawls and lawsuits, extravagance in dress and food, the decline of tillage, and depopulation; especially laws against rogues, beggars, and “Egyptian” vagabonds—so called, at least—who have swarmed throughout Germany, France, Italy, and Poland, as you may read in Münster, Krantz, and Aventinus, just as those Tartars and Arabs do today in the eastern countries.

Yet wrongdoing has been so great in every age that these measures seem to achieve little. “Let there be no beggar in our state,” says Plato. He would have them purged from a commonwealth, like a corrupt humour from the body: they are like so many ulcers and boils, which must be cured before the melancholy body can find relief.

For the measures taken in this matter by Charlemagne, the Chinese, the Spaniards, the Duke of Saxony, and many other states, read Arnisaeus, chapter 19; Botero, Book 8, chapter 2; and Osório, The Deeds of King Manuel, Book 11. When a country has too many people, as a pasture often has too many cattle, it used in former times to relieve itself by sending out colonies or by wars, like the ancient Romans; or by employing people at home on public works, such as bridges and roads, for which those Romans were famous on this island.

as Augustus Caesar did at Rome, and the Spaniards in their mines in the Indies, for example at Potosí in Peru, where some 30,000 men are continually at work and 6,000 furnaces constantly blaze. Aqueducts, bridges, harbours, those astonishing works of Trajan, Claudius’s at Ostia, the Baths of Diocletian, Lake Fucinus, the Piraeus at Athens built by Themistocles, amphitheatres of finely worked marble at Verona, Philippi, and Heraclea in Thrace, and the Appian and Flaminian Ways—all these prodigious works bear witness.

And rather than let them remain idle, rulers should act as those Egyptian pharaohs, Moeris and Sesostris, did: set their subjects to build unnecessary pyramids, obelisks, labyrinths, canals, and lakes, all gigantic works, to turn them away from rebellion, dissipation, and drunkenness—“so that they may be fed and may not, through wandering about, lose the habit of work.”

Another eyesore is the lack of water channels and navigable rivers: political writers such as Botero and Hippolytus a Collibus consider neglect of these a serious defect in a commonwealth. Astonishing sums are spent on them in the Low Countries, the Duchy of Milan, the territory of Padua, in France, Italy, and China; likewise on diverting water to irrigate and refresh barren land, and to drain fens, bogs, and marshes.

By these means Masinissa made many inland parts of Barbary and Numidia in Africa fruitful and productive, where before his time they had been uncultivated and forbidding. Great efforts of this kind are made throughout the eastern countries, especially in Egypt, around Babylon and Damascus, as Varthema and Gotthard Arthus report; around Barcelona, Segovia, Murcia, and many other places in Spain, and Milan in Italy. As a result their soil is greatly enriched, and countless benefits accrue to the inhabitants.

The Turks recently attempted to cut through the isthmus between Africa and Asia. Sesostris, Darius, and some of the pharaohs of Egypt had undertaken this before, but unsuccessfully, as Diodorus Siculus and Pliny record. For the Red Sea, being three cubits higher than Egypt, would have flooded the whole country: “they abandoned the undertaking,” they left off. Yet, as the same Diodorus writes, Ptolemy resumed the work many years later and completed it at a more suitable place.

Demetrius, Julius Caesar, Nero, Domitian, and Herodes Atticus likewise attempted to make the Isthmus of Corinth navigable, to provide a quicker and less dangerous passage between the Ionian and Aegean seas. But as this could not readily be done, the Peloponnesians built a wall like our Picts’ Wall near Schoenus, where Neptune’s temple stood, across the narrowest part of the isthmus. Diodorus mentions it in Book 11, and Herodotus in Book 8, Urania.

Our more recent writers call it the Hexamilion. Murad the Turk demolished it; the Venetians repaired it in 1453, in fifteen days, with 30,000 men. Some people, says Acosta, would have a passage cut from Panama to Nombre de Dios in America. The French historians de Thou and de Serres, meanwhile, speak of a remarkable waterway planned in France under Henry IV, from the Loire to the Seine and from the Rhône to the Loire.

A similar scheme, from the Saône to the Moselle, had previously been attempted by the emperor Domitian, as Cornelius Tacitus relates in Book 13 of his Annals, and afterwards by Charlemagne and others.

In former times great sums were spent on cutting or repairing river channels and passages. Aurelian did this on the Tiber, making it navigable to Rome to bring grain from Egypt to the city: “he dug out the shallows of its rising bed,” says Vopiscus, “and built up the banks of the Tiber”; he deepened fords, built banks, and so on. Dilapidated harbours were also restored, as the emperor Claudius attempted at Ostia with immense effort and expense, as I have said, and as the Venetians do today to preserve their city.

In most regions of Europe, many excellent ways of enriching their territories have been encouraged and devised: introducing plants from the Indies among us, for example, and silkworms. The mulberry leaves alone on the plains of Granada bring 30,000 crowns a year into the King of Spain’s treasury, besides supporting the many trades and craftspeople employed in this work in the kingdom of Granada, Murcia, and throughout Spain. In France, salt brings in a great revenue, and so forth.

Whether such things might be undertaken as successfully here is open to debate: silkworms, I mean, vines, fir trees, and so on. Cardan urges Edward VI to plant olives, and is fully persuaded that they would thrive on this island.