Note 768 — Chapter VII · THE TOWNS.

This not only appears from the digests, but from numerous merely incidental notices in the authors of the time. The population were crowded into cities, and the country was deserted. This was not the result of a healthy manufacturing or commercial movement, but of a state of universal distraction and insecurity. Had the cultivation of the land ceased through a prudent calculation of political economy, we should not have heard of compulsory tillage.