The utility (I mean plainly the lucre of it) is not so
great now in our nation as arises from merchandise and the trading
of the city, from whence many of the best estates and chief honours
of the kingdom are derived; we have no men now fetched from the
plough to be made lords, as they were in Rome to be made consuls and
dictators, the reason of which I conceive to be from an evil custom
now grown as strong among us as if it were a law, which is, that no
men put their children to be bred up apprentices in agriculture, as
in other trades, but such who are so poor, that when they come to be
men they have not wherewithal to set up in it, and so can only farm
some small parcel of ground, the rent of which devours all but the
bare subsistence of the tenant; whilst they who are proprietors of
the land are either too proud or, for want of that kind of
education, too ignorant to improve their estates, though the means
of doing it be as easy and certain in this as in any other track of
commerce. If there were always two or three thousand youths, for
seven or eight years bound to this profession, that they might learn
the whole art of it, and afterwards be enabled to be masters in it,
by a moderate stock, I cannot doubt but that we should see as many
aldermen's estates made in the country as now we do out of all kind
of merchandising in the city.
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