The Anatomy of Melancholy

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.