CHAPTER X.

Effects of Epidemics on Registers of Births, Deaths,

and Marriages.

IT appears clearly, from the very valuable tables of mortality which Sussmilch has collected, and which include periods of 50 or 60 years, that all the countries of Europe are subject to periodical sickly seasons, which check their increase; and very few are exempt from those great and wasting plagues, which, once or twice, perhaps, in a century, sweep off the third or fourth part of their inhabitants. The way in which these periods of mortality affect all the general proportions of births, deaths, and marriages, is strikingly illustrated in the tables for Prussia and Lithuania, from the year 1692 to the year 1757.

1 Sussmilch, Gottliche Ordnung, vol. i. table xxi. p. 83, of the tables.

Effects of epidemics on registers

The table, from which this is copied, contains the marriages, births, and deaths, for every particular year during the whole period; but to bring

it into a smaller compass, I have retained only the general average drawn from the shorter periods of five and four years, except where the numbers for the individual years presented any fact worthy of particular observation. The year 1711, immediately succeeding the great plague, is not included by Sussmilch in any general average; but he has given the particular numbers, and if they be accurate they show the very sudden and prodigious effect of a great mortality on the number of marriages.

Sussmilch calculates that above one third of the people was destroyed by the plague; and yet, notwithstanding this great diminution of the popu lation, it will appear by a reference to the table, that the number of marriages in the year 1711 was very nearly double the average of the six years preceding the plague." To produce this ef

The number of people before the plague, according to Sussmilch's calculation, (vol. i. ch. ix. sect. 173.) was 570,000 from which if we subtract 247,733, the number dying in the plague, the remainder 322,267 will be the population after the plague; which, divided by the

of births, deaths, and marriages.

fect we must suppose that almost all who were at the age of puberty were induced, from the demand for labor, and the number of vacant employments, immediately to marry. This immense number of marriages in the year could not possibly be accompanied by a great proportional number of births, because we cannot suppose that the new marriages could each yield more than one birth in the year, and the rest must come from the marriages which had continued unbroken through the plague. We cannot therefore be surprised that the proportion of births to marriages in this year should be only 2.7 to 1, or 27 to 10. But though the proportion of births to marriages could not be great, yet on account of the extraordinary number of marriages, the absolute number of births must be great; and as the number of deaths would naturally be small, the proportion of births to deaths is prodigious, being 320 to 100; an excess of

number of marriages and the number of births for the year 1711, makes the marriages about one twenty-sixth part of the population, and the births about one tenth part. Such extraordinary proportions could only occur in any country, in an individual year. If they were to continue, they would double the population in less than ten years.