ChapterTwoBookOne54

In countries where the great and the fake rich lay all the burden of taxes and public obligations on the common people and take from them all means and hope of having merely perfect necessities, far from being able to aspire to conveniences and superfluities, the common people imperceptibly lose the desire to establish themselves, to marry, and to have a family. They go to establish themselves in neighboring countries where they are better treated. Despair obliges another large number to enlist in foreign armies. In a word, the population shrinks. However, the great men imagine that they have well served the prince and have done their own business well by using the ordinary ways that cause this decrease. (205)

But when this decrease in the number of people comes to the point of making its effects felt by the same people who never reason about the future and only look at the present and everything that is obvious, like beasts who only track objects that they smell, they suddenly begin to complain that workers and laborers can no longer be found, that it is difficult to recruit soldiers, that commerce has stopped, that estates are no longer worth much, that their produce cannot be sold, that revenues have considerably decreased, that the prince does not pay salaries, that taxes must be appallingly extorted, yet without success (206), etc. And nevertheless they do not want to understand that they are the ones who have caused all these problems and that the time has come to pay for their foolishness to their own confusion and shame, although to cover it up they sometimes look for reasons that are far from the truth: for example, there is no longer any money, and it has gone to foreign countries (whereas it is the people who have gone there); these are random events that man’s wisdom could not have foreseen, and other such talk that means nothing. Because the reason that I have just put forward is very noticeable and very natural: as soon as the common people, who are the largest part of a state’s population, are reduced to (207) begging and leave to seek their fortune elsewhere, the consumption of life’s necessities decreases in proportion, followed by the value of estates and their produce, commerce, and the prince’s revenues. Because once again it is an incontestable truth that any good of no matter what kind only has value in proportion to the number of those who use it.