Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroy’d, can never be supplied.

These lines come from Oliver Goldsmith’s long poem *The Deserted Village* (1770), a work shaped by mid‑18th‑century anxieties about rural depopulation and the consolidation of land into large estates. Goldsmith laments the decline of the traditional English village—often linked by contemporaries to enclosure, the displacement of small farmers, and the lure or necessity of migration to towns or overseas. Written during Goldsmith’s London years, the poem contrasts an idealized past rural community with a present in which economic “improvement” and luxury concentrate wealth while eroding the social fabric. The passage occurs in the poem’s moral argument about national health and stability.

Goldsmith argues that a nation is imperiled when prosperity is measured only by accumulating wealth rather than sustaining people and communities. The “princes and lords” symbolize elite power’s fragility—titles and fortunes can rise or vanish with political chance—whereas the “bold peasantry” represents the durable civic backbone: productive labor, local independence, and social continuity. Once that class is destroyed through displacement and economic pressure, it cannot simply be recreated by decree. The couplets thus critique inequality and “improvement” that hollows out rural life, suggesting that true national flourishing depends on broadly shared security and a stable, rooted populace.

1) “Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey, / Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”
2) “But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, / When once destroyed, can never be supplied.”