of strong men down on
an acre of ground, with no lodging, and nothing to eat. Nor is it
political economy to build a city on good ground, and fill it with store
of corn and treasure, and put a score of lepers to live in it. Political
economy creates together the means of life, and the living persons who
are to use them; and of both, the best and the most that it can, but
imperatively the best, not the most. A few good and healthy men, rather
than a multitude of diseased rogues; and a little real milk and wine
rather than much chalk and petroleum; but the gist of the whole business
is that the men and their property must both be produced together--not
one to the loss of the other. Property must not be created in lands
desolate by exile of their people, nor multiplied and depraved humanity,
in lands barren of bread.

121. Nevertheless, though the men and their possessions are to be
increased at the same time, the first object of thought is always to be
the multiplication of a worthy people. The strength of the nation is in
its multitude, not in its territory; but only in its sound multitude. It
is one thing, both in a man and a nation, to gain flesh, and another to
be swollen with putrid humors. Not that multitude ever ought to be
inconsistent with virtue. Two men should be wiser than one, and two
thousand than two; nor do I know another so gross fallacy in the records
of human stupidity as that excuse for neglect of crime by greatness of
cities. As if the first purpose of congregation were not to devise laws
and repress crimes! As if bees and wasps could live honestly in flocks--
men, only in separate dens! As if it were easy to help one another on
the opposite sides of a mountain, and impossible on the opposite sides of
a street! But when the men are true and good, and stand shoulder to
shoulder, the strength of any nation is in its quantity of life, not in
its land nor gold. The more good men a state has, in proportion to its
territory, the stronger the state. And as it has been the madness of
economists to seek for gold instead of life, so it has been the madness
of kings to seek for land instead of life. They want the town on the
other side of the river, and seek it at the spear point; it never enters
their stupid heads that to double the honest souls in the town on this
side of the river would make them stronger kings; and that this doubling
might be done by the ploughshare instead of the spear, and t