18.3. 3. What Countries are best cultivated.
Countries are not cultivated
in proportion to their fertility, but to their liberty; and if we make
an imaginary division of the earth, we shall be astonished to see in
most ages deserts in the most fruitful parts, and great nations in those
where nature seems to refuse everything.
It is natural for a people to leave a bad soil to seek a better, and
not to leave a good soil to go in search of worse. Most invasions have,
therefore, been made in countries which nature seems to have formed for
happiness; and as nothing is more nearly allied than desolation and
invasion, the best provinces are most frequently depopulated, while the
frightful countries of the north continue always inhabited, from their
being almost uninhabitable.
We find by what historians tell us of the passage of the people of
Scandinavia along the banks of the Danube that this was not a conquest,
but only a migration into desert countries.
These happy climates must therefore have been depopulated by other
migrations, though we know not the tragic scenes that happened. "It
appears by many monuments of antiquity," says Aristotle,
[3]
"that the Sardinians were a Grecian colony. They were formerly very rich; and
Aristeus, so famed for his love of agriculture, was their law-giver. But
they have since fallen to decay; for the Carthaginians, becoming their
masters, destroyed everything proper tor the nourishment of man, and
forbade the cultivation of the lands on pain of death." Sardinia was not
recovered in the time of Aristotle, nor is it to this day.
The most temperate parts of Persia, Turkey, Muscovy, and Poland have
not been able to recover perfectly from the devastations of the Tartars.
Footnotes
[3]
Or he who wrote the book "De Mirabilibus."
