and they sometimes seek occasions for
making war, that they may train up their soldiers in the art of cutting
throats; or as Sallust observed, for keeping their hands in use, that
they may not grow dull by too long an intermission. But France has
learned to its cost, how dangerous it is to feed such beasts. The fate
of the Romans, Carthaginians, and Syrians, and many other nations and
cities, which were both overturned and quite ruined by those standing
armies, should make others wiser: and the folly of this maxim of the
French, appears plainly even from this, that their trained soldiers
often find your raw men prove too hard for them; of which I will not say
much, lest you may think I flatter the English. Every day's experience
shows, that the mechanics in the towns, or the clowns in the country,
are not afraid of fighting with those idle gentlemen, if they are not
disabled by some misfortune in their body, or dispirited by extreme
want, so that you need not fear that those well-shaped and strong men
(for it is only such that noblemen love to keep about them, till they
spoil them) who now grow feeble with ease, and are softened with their
effeminate manner of life, would be less fit for action if they were
well bred and well employed. And it seems very unreasonable, that for
the prospect of a war, which you need never have but when you please,
you should maintain so many idle men, as will always disturb you in
time of peace, which is ever to be more considered than war. But I do
not think that this necessity of stealing arises only from hence; there
is another cause of it more peculiar to England.'--'What is that?' said
the Cardinal.--'The increase of pasture,' said I, 'by which your sheep,
which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to
devour men, and unpeople, not only villages, but towns; for wherever it
is found that the sheep of any soil yield a softer and richer wool than
ordinary, there the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men the
abbots, not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor
thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the
public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the course of
agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches,
and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them. As if
forests and parks had swallowed up too little of the land, those worthy
countrymen turn the best inhabited p