their wits for new contrivances, new inventions, new trades, stocks,
projects, and anything to retrieve the desperate credit of their
fortunes. That this is probable to be the cause will appear further
thus. France (though I do not believe all the great outcries we
make of their misery and distress--if one-half of which be true,
they are certainly the best subjects in the world) yet without
question has felt its share of the losses and damages of the war;
but the poverty there falling chiefly on the poorer sort of people,
they have not been so fruitful in inventions and practices of this
nature, their genius being quite of another strain. As for the
gentry and more capable sort, the first thing a Frenchman flies to
in his distress is the army; and he seldom comes back from thence to
get an estate by painful industry, but either has his brains knocked
out or makes his fortune there.

If industry be in any business rewarded with success it is in the
merchandising part of the world, who indeed may more truly be said
to live by their wits than any people whatsoever. All foreign
negotiation, though to some it is a plain road by the help of
custom, yet is in its beginning all project, contrivance, and
invention. Every new voyage the merchant contrives is a project;
and ships are sent from port to port, as markets and merchandises
differ, by the help of strange and universal intelligence--wherein
some are so exquisite, so swift, and so exact, that a merchant
sitting at home in his counting-house at once converses with all
parts of the known world. This and travel make a true-bred merchant
the most intelligent man in the world, and consequently the most
capable, when urged by necessity, to contrive new ways to live. And
from hence, I humbly conceive, may very properly be derived the
projects, so much the subject of the present discourse. And to this