Of Cities The landlords who have only small estates usually reside in market towns and villages near their land and farmers. The transport of the produce they derive from them into distant cities would not enable them to live comfortably there. But the landlords who have several large estates have the means to go and live at a distance from them to enjoy agreeable society with other landowners and gentlemen of the same condition.
If a prince or nobleman who has received large grants of land on the conquest or discovery of a country fixes his residence in some pleasant spot, and several other noblemen come to live there to be within reach of seeing each other frequently and enjoying agreeable society, this place will become a city.
Great houses will be built there for the noblemen in question, and an infinity of others for the merchants, artisans, and people of all sorts of professions whom the residence of these noblemen will attract thither. For the service of these noblemen, bakers, butchers, brewers, wine merchants, manufacturers of all kinds, will be needed. These will build houses in the locality or will rent houses built by others. There is no great nobleman whose expense upon his house, his retinue and servants, does not maintain merchants and artisans of all kinds, as may be seen from the detailed calculations which I have caused to be made in the supplement of this essay.
As all these artisans and undertakers serve each other as well as the nobility it is overlooked that the upkeep of them all falls ultimately on the nobles and landowners. It is not perceived that all the little houses in a city such as we have described depend upon and subsist at the expense of the great houses. It will, however, be shown later that all the classes and inhabitants of a state live at the expense of the proprietors of land. The city in question will increase still further if the king or the government establish in it law courts to which the people of the market towns and villages of the province must have recourse. An increase of undertakers and artisans of every sort will be needed for the service of the legal officials and lawyers.
If in this same city workshops and manufactories be set up apart from home consumption for export and sale abroad, the city will be large in proportion to the workmen and artisans who live there at the expense of the foreigner.
But if we put aside these considerations so as not to complicate our subject, we may say that the assemblage of several rich landowners living together in the same place suffices to form what is called a city, and that many cities in Europe, in the interior of the country, owe the number of their inhabitants to this assemblage: in which case the size of a city is naturally proportioned to the number of landlords who live there, or rather to the produce of the land which belongs to them after deduction of the cost of carriage to those whose land is the furthest removed, and the part which they are obliged to furnish to the king or the government, which is usually consumed in the capital.
