He that will not work shall not eat

From Love and Hate in Jamestown by David A. Price.

I speake not this to all of you, for divers of you I know deserve both honour and reward, better then is yet here to be had. But the greater part must be more industrious, or starve, how ever you have been heretofore tollerated by the authoritie of the councell. . . . You see now that power resteth wholly in my selfe: you must obey this now for a law, that he that will not worke shall not eate (except by sicknesse he be disabled), for the labours of thirtie or fortie honest and industrious men shall not be consumed to maintaine an hundred and fiftie idle loyterers. . . . There are now no more counsellers to protect you....

He that will not work shall not eat. The new operating principle of the colony was alien to the “loyterers,” but it proved effective. Within three months, the men had built twenty houses, dug a well that brought clean, fresh water, and planted thirty or forty acres. In the latter endeavor, they had the help of two native prisoners, by the names of Kemps and Tassore, who had been treated well enough that they took it upon themselves to teach the English native methods of planting. Smith commanded the building of a checkpoint at the neck of the peninsula, guarded at all times by a well-armed garrison that allowed neither Englishmen nor natives to cross without his orders. With that measure, the mysterious pilfering of the colony’s weapons and tools came to an end, and the colonists no longer lived in fear of petty raids as they had the year before.

Smith's edict made me think of Rudyard Kipling's evergreen warning, Gods of the Copybook Headings, particularly:

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

However, the sentiment, if not the quote itself, originates with Paul in The Bible. From Wikipedia.

The aphorism is found in the Second Epistle of Paul the Apostle (with Silvanus and Timothy) to the Thessalonians, in which Paul writes:

εἴ τις οὐ θέλει ἐργάζεσθαι μηδὲ ἐσθιέτω
eí tis ou thélei ergázesthai mēdè esthiétō

that is,

If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.