Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/253

 insufficient organisation of the military and naval defensive forces of the country; with the absence of religious toleration, proper means of internal communication, a sound banking system, and the other conditions which he notes as those of the wealth and prosperity of Holland. One-tenth part of the annual expenditure of the nation, he calculates, would maintain an army of 100,000 foot, 30,000 horse, and 40,000 sailors, were the revenue properly administered. He wishes to employ the surplus labour of the kingdom in some profitable manner, calculating it could earn two millions a year, but he believes that the capital and labour actually in the kingdom are sufficient 'to drive the trade of the whole commercial world.' Situation, trade, and water carriage would have been useless to the Dutch, had they not been developed by a wise policy. This policy he analyses into three heads, viz.: 1. Liberty of conscience; 2. Securing the title to lands and houses by land registries; and 3. the Dutch banking system, 'the use whereof is to increase money, or rather to make a small sum equivalent in trade to a greater.' The Dutch also knew how to make the burden of the maintenance of the poor as light as possible. The burden of military service is also reduced by them to the minimum, and the smallest number possible of the population are engaged in cow-keeping, which in his opinion is the least profitable branch of trade. Here is the example for England to follow; and the concluding pages of the essay are occupied with an appeal to the younger sons of the English landed gentry, to go into trade instead of starving at home, and to their parents to found a bank with a capital secured upon land. The Dutch, he points out, had known how to profit by their situation on the sea, and how to improve the means of water carriage at their command. Thus situation had given them shipping, and shipping had given them the command of the trade of the world. 'Do they not work the sugar of the West Indies,' he asks, 'the timber and iron of the Baltic; the hemp of Russia, the lead, tin and wool of England, the quicksilver and silk of Italy, the yarns and dyeing stuffs of Turkey?' They do so, he replies, because their shipping goes to every part of the world; 'and