Politics & Power Quote by William Petty

Petty’s line reads like an early warning label on modern capitalism: concentrate wealth, strip people of dignified options, and you don’t just get hardship, you get instability with a fuse.

As a 17th-century economist, Petty isn’t moralizing about greed; he’s diagnosing political risk. The phrasing is bluntly causal - “Causes of Civil War” - as if rebellion were a predictable output of bad national accounting. That’s the subtext: civil conflict isn’t an irrational tantrum of the masses, it’s the foreseeable result of structural incentives. When “the Wealth of the Nation is in too few mens hands,” the state becomes a referee for the rich rather than a guarantor of order for everyone, and the legitimacy that keeps society from fracturing starts to thin.

The most revealing move is his grim menu of choices: “beg, or steal, or be Souldiers.” Petty collapses poverty, crime, and militarization into the same pipeline of necessity. “Souldiers” isn’t heroic here; it’s coercion by economics, a way to warehouse desperation and redirect it outward. If the only steady wage is a uniform, the country is effectively buying peace at home by exporting violence or by building an armed class with little to lose.

Context matters: Petty lived through the English Civil Wars and worked in a world where states were becoming more centralized, more militarized, and more attentive to “political arithmetic.” His intent is technocratic and unsettlingly contemporary: provide “certain means” - policy, welfare, employment, land, something dependable - or accept that inequality will eventually arrive not as a statistic, but as a battlefield.