Of colonies
What shall we say of colonies? Were they a good help to the greatness of Rome or not? That they were a great help to the increase of the power it cannot be doubted; but that they multiplied also the number of inhabitants it is a thing somewhat doubtful. Howbeit, for mine own opinion I should think they were a great help and means unto it. For if any man think by taking the people out and sending them to colonies elsewhere that the city thereby comes rather to diminish than increase, haply for all that the contrary may happen. For as plants cannot prosper so well nor multiply so fast in a nursery where they are set and planted near together as where they are transplanted into an open ground, even so men make no such fruitful propagation of children where they are enclosed and shut up within the walls of the city they are bred and born in as they do abroad in divers other parts where they are sent unto. For sometimes the plague or other contagious sickness or disease consumeth them, sometimes famine enforceth them to change their habitations, sometimes foreign wars take out of the world the stoutest men amongst them, sometimes civil wars make the quietest sort forsake their dwellings; and from many poverty and misery taketh away the mind, the means and the spirit to wed or think on propagation.
Now they that might have died in Rome with the aforesaid evils, and without children, being removed to other places escape the foresaid perils, and, being bestowed in colonies and provided for both of house and ground to it, betake themselves to wives and children and to propagate and breed them up and so increase infinitely, and of ten become an hundred.
But what is this to the purpose, may some man say? Let us suppose that they that are sent into colonies would not increase their country if they tarried at home how should they then increase it when they are sent thence abroad to other places?
Well enough. First, because colonies with their mother out of which they issued make, as it were, but one body. Then next, because the love of our original country, which every man affecteth, and the dependence thereof (which many ways help) and the desire and hope to aspire to dignity and honour which evermore draw unto it the worthiest and most noble minds. By which means the country grows to be more populous and rich.
Who can deny but that the colonies that issued, as it were, out of one stock, from Alba Longa, and so many besides as Rome hath sent out, brought not much magnificence and greatness, both to the one and the other? And that the Portuguese issued out of Lisbon, to possess and inhabit the islands of Azores, Cape Verde, Madeira and others have not amplified and increased Lisbon a great deal more than if they had never removed thence to those same islands?
Howbeit, true it is if colonies must increase their mother, it is very necessary that they be near neighbours, otherwise through long distance of place love waxeth cold, and all commerce is cut off clean. And therefore the Romans for the space of six hundred years sent not a colony out of Italy, and the first were Carthage and Narbonne; as is at large before declared in my sixth book of Reason of State, in the chapter of Colonies.
And these be the means wherewith the Romans, either through their singular dexterity or excellent wits, have drawn strange nations unto their city. Let us now speak of the means that other nations also as well as they have used in this case, where it shall not be from the purpose that we begin at religion first as at the thing that ought to be the head and spring of all our works and actions.
