The Greatness of Cities [30]
seek his commodity and ease where he may find it best. We must also add to these things aforesaid that great cities are more subject unto dearths than the little, for they need more sustenance and victuals. The plague also afflicteth them more surely and more often, with greater loss of people. And to speak in a word, great cities are subject to all the difficulties and hardness we have before declared because they need a great deal more. So that, although men were as apt to generation in the height and pride of the Romans, greatness as in the first beginning thereof, yet for all that the people increased not proportionably. For the virtue nutritive of that city had no power to go further, so that in success of time the inhabitants, finding much want and less means to supply their lack of victual, either forbare to marry or, if they did marry, their children oppressed with penury, their parents affording them no relief, fled their own country and sought abroad for better fortune. To the which inconvenience the Romans willing to provide a remedy, they made choice of a number of poor citizens and sent them into colonies, where, like trees transplanted, they might have more room to better themselves both in condition and commodity, and by that means increase and multiply the faster. By the selfsame reason mankind grown to a certain complete number hath grown no further. And it is three thousand years agone and more that the world was replenished as full with people as it is at this present, for the fruits of the earth and the plenty of victual doth not suffice to feed a greater number. In Mesopotamia mankind did first begin to propagate. From thence by success of time it increased and spread apace daily both far and near and having replenished the firm land they transported themselves into the islands of the sea; and so from our counties they have at length arrived by little and little to the counties we call the New World. And what is there under the sun that doth make man, with more horrible effusion of blood, to fight for, and with more cruelty, than the earth, food and commodity of habitation? The Suevians accounted it an honour and a glory to them to bring their confines by many hundred miles into a waste and wilderness. In the New World, in the isle of St. Dominic and the borders thereabout, the people chase and hunt men as we do deer and hares. The like do many of the people of Brazil, especially they whom we call Aymores, who tear in pieces and devour young boys and young girls alive, and open the bellies of the women great with child, and take the creatures out, and in the presence and sight of the fathers themselves eat them roasted upon the coals -- a most horrible thing to hear, much more to see it. The people of Guinea for the most part live so poor and needy as they daily sell their own children for very vile price to the Moors, who carry them into Barbary, and to the Portugals, who send them to their islands, or sell them to the Castilians for the New World. The people of Peru do the like, who for little more than nothing give their children to them will have them, which proceedeth of misery, and of the impotency they have to bring them up and to maintain them. The Tartars and the Arabians live upon stealth and rapine; the Nasamoni and the Cafri, the most savage and barbarous people of all Ethiopia, live upon the spoils of others' shipwrecks, as the Portugals have many times felt. It is also a thing known to all men how oft the French, the Dutch, the Goths, the Huns, the Avari, the Tartars and divers other nations, unable through their infinite multitude of people to live in their own countries, have left their confines and possessed themselves with other men's countries, to the utter ruin and destruction of the inhabitants therein. Hence it came to pass that within few ages all the provinces of Europe and of Asia became possessed, in a manner, of strange people, fled and run out of their counties and habitations either for the mighty multitude of people their country could not sustain, or for