But now our
soil either will not, or at the leastwise may not, bear either woad
or madder. I say not that the ground is not able so to do, but that
we are negligent, afraid of the pilling of our grounds, and careless
of our own profits, as men rather willing to buy the same of others
than take any pain to plant them here at home. The like I may say of
flax, which by law ought to be sown in every country town in England,
more or less; but I see no success of that good and wholesome law;
sith it is rather contemptuously rejected than otherwise dutifully
kept in any place in England.
Some say that our great number of laws do breed a general negligence
and contempt of all good order, because we have so many that no
subject can live without the transgression of some of them, and that
the often alteration of our ordinances doth much harm in this
respect, which (after Aristotle) doth seem to carry some reason
withal, for (as Cornelius Gallus hath)--
_"Eventus varios res nova semper habet."_[1]
[1] "An innovation, has always mixed effects."
But very many let not to affirm that the greedy corruption of the
promoters on the one side, facility in dispensing with good laws and
first breach of the same in the lawmakers and superiors and private
respects of their establishment on the other, are the greatest causes
why the inferiors regard no good order, being always so ready to
offend without any faculty one way as they are otherwise to presume
upon the examples of their betters when any hold is to be taken.
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