8. In what time the Housing is replenished after a Plague?
9. What proportion die of each general and particular Casualties?
10. What Years are Fruitful and Mortal, and in what Spaces and Intervals they follow each other?
11. In what proportion Men neglect the Orders of the Church, and Sects have increased? |97|
12. The disproportion of Parishes?
13. Why the Burials in London exceed the Christenings, when the contrary is visible in the Country?
To this I might answer in general, by saying, that those, who cannot apprehend the reason of these Enquiries, are unfit to trouble themselves to ask them.
2. I might answer by asking, Why so many have spent their times and Estates about the Art of making Gold? which, if it were much known, would only exalt Silver into the place which Gold now possesseth; and if it were known but to some one Person, the same single Adeptus could not, nay, durst not enjoy it, but must be either a Prisoner to some Prince, and Slave to some Voluptuary, or else skulk obscurely up and down for his privacy and concealment.
3. I might answer, That there is much pleasure in deducing so many abstruse and unexpected inferences out of these poor despised Bills of Mortality; and in building upon that ground, which hath lain waste these eighty years. And there is pleasure in doing something new, though never so little, without pestering the World with voluminous Transcriptions. |98|
4. But I answer more seriously, by complaining, That whereas the Art of Governing, and the true Politicks, is how to preserve the Subject in Peace and Plenty; that men study only that part of it which teacheth how to supplant and over-reach one another, and how, not by fair out-running, but by tripping up each other's heels, to win the Prize.
Now, the Foundation or Elements of this honest harmless Policy is to understand the Land, and the hands of the Territory, to be governed according to all their intrinsick
