hands of a few great proprietors, since the other classes, having no means of selling their labour, or competing with the numerous slaves of the wealthy, would have been entirely starved, had it not been for the curious custom which arose of distributing large quantities of corn gratis to the poorer or landless citizens. No less than two hundred thousand were thus fed in Augustus' reign, and probably had little else to depend upon. Hence the poorer free citizens could not increase, and they are said to have been constantly in the habit of exposing their unfortunate children, since the quantity of food doled out was not enough for a family to subsist upon.

The jus trium liberorum (law for rewarding fathers of three children) could effect nothing in such circumstances, in making the poor give birth to large families, although it may occasionally have tempted the landed proprietors to increase their families. Had the poor had large numbers of children in such a miserable state of society, they must have been born only to die of starvation, since the food doled out by the Government was not sufficient to feed all.

Positive laws to encourage marriage, says Mr. Malthus, enacted on the urgency of the occasion, and not mixed with religion, as in China and some other countries, are seldom calculated to answer the end they aim at, and therefore generally indicate ignorance in the legislator who proposes them; but the apparent necessity of them almost always indicates a very great degree of moral and political depravity in the State; and in the countries in which they are most strongly insisted on, not only vicious manners will be found to prevail, but political institutions extremely unfavourable to industry, and, consequently, to population.

On this account Malthus entirely disagreed with Hume, who supposed that the Roman world was probably most populous during the long peace under Trajan and the Antonines. Wars, he says, do not depopulate much while industry continues in vigour and peace will not increase the number of people when they cannot find means of subsistence. "The renewal of the laws relating to marriage under Trajan indicates the continued prevalence of vicious habits, and of a languishing industry, and seems to be inconsistent with the supposition of a great increase of population."

Hume also thought that the population of the ancient world was greater than in modern times, because, he said, there were hosts of domestic servants in modern States remaining unmarried. But the contrary inference, says Malthus, seems to be

the more probable. When the difficulties attending the rearing of a family are very great, and, consequently, many persons of both sexes remain single, we may naturally suppose that the population is stationary, but by no means that it is not absoIntely great; because the difficulty of rearing a family may arise from the very circumstance of a very great absolute population, and the consequent fulness of all the channels to a livelihood; though the same difficulty may undoubtedly exist in a thinly peopled country, which is yet stationary in its population.

The number of unmarried persons in proportion to the whole number, says Malthus, may form some criterion by which we may judge whether population is increasing, stationary, or decreasing; but will not enable us to determine anything respecting absolute populousness. Yet even in this point we may be deceived, since, in some southern countries early marriages are general, and very few women remain in a state of celibacy, yet the people not only do not increase, but the actual number is perhaps small. In this case the removal of the preventive check is made up by the excessive force of the positive check. The sum of all the positive and preventive checks taken together, forms, undoubtedly, the immediate cause which represses population; but we never can expect to obtain and estimate accurately this sum in any country; and we can certainly draw no safe conclusion from the contemplation of two or three of these checks taken by themselves, because it so frequently happens that the excess of one check is balanced by the defect of some other.

Causes which affect the number of births or deaths may or may not affect the average population, according to circumstances; but causes which affect the production and distribution of the means of subsistence must necessarily affect population; and it is therefore on these causes, besides actual enumerations, on which we can with any certainty rely. "All the checks to population, which have been hitherto considered in the course of this review of human society, are clearly resolvable into moral restraint, vice, and misery."

With regard, then, to the checks to population in ancient Rome, Mr. Malthus thinks that moral restraint acted but feebly in restraining the increase of numbers. And of the other branch of the preventive check, which comes under the denomination of "vice," according to Mr. Malthus, though its effect seems to have been very considerable in the later periods of Roman history and in some other countes; yet, on the

whole, he thinks its operation was much inferior to the positive checks. A large portion of the procreative power was called into action among the Romans, the redundancy being checked by violent causes, among which war was the most prominent and striking, and after which came famines and violent diseases. In most of these ancient nations the population seems to have been seldom measured accurately according to the average and permanent means of subsistence, but generally to have vibrated between the two extremes, and therefore the contrasts between want and plenty were strongly marked, as might be expected in the earlier and less experienced ages of human society.

CHAPTER IV.

CHECKS TO POPULATION IN MODERN EUROPE.

OOK ij. of Malthus' Essay treats of the checks to population in the different States of modern Europe,-Norway, Sweden, Russia, Germany, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, and Ireland. In Malthus' day, Norway seems to have been, perhaps, the most prosperous country in Europe; and it was distinguished by the great healthiness of its people. The death-rate he puts down as only one in 48, in a population of about three-quarters of a million.

With such a very low positive check, Malthus at once looked for the existence of a very high preventive check; and found this to be present in the very small proportion of marriages (one in 130) taking place annually in Norway.

There were, then as now, no large manufacturing towns in Norway to take away the overflowing population of the country; and, hence, as emigration was not then in vogue, the Norwegian peasant seldom left the village he was born in. Until, then, some married person died, there was usually no place for another marriage to take place. "In countries more fully peopled (says Malthus) this subject is always involved in great obscurity. Each man naturally thinks that he has as good a chance of finding employment as his neighbour, and that if he fail in one place he shall succeed in another. He marries, therefore, and trusts to fortune and the effect too frequently is, that the redundant population occasioned in this manner is repressed by the positive checks of poverty and disease.”

It is without doubt, says our author, owing to the preventive check to population, as much as to any peculiar healthiness of air, that the mortality of Norway is so low. In every country the principal mortality takes place among very young children; and the smaller number of these in Norway, in proportion to the whole population, will naturally occasion a smaller mortality than in other countries, supposing the climate to be equally healthy.

The population of Norway is now about 1,800,000, a very large accession since the days of Malthus, and there has of

late years been a very large emigration from that country to the United States, which indicates that, in all probability, there will soon be less of prudential restraint in the matter of births, and hence, doubtless, a higher death-rate than at the commencement of this century. The former low death-rate of Norway, one in 48, is not attained to at present by almost any European State except Norway. It is little more than 20 per 1000 per annum.

Malthus mentions in his work that Norway is almost the only country in Europe where a traveller will hear any apprehensions expressed of a redundant population, and where the danger to the happiness of the lower classes of people from this cause, is in some degree seen and understood. "This obviously arises from the smallness of the population altogether and the consequent narrowness of the subject. If our attention were confined to one parish, and there were no power of emigrating from it, the most careless observer could not fail to remark that, if all married at twenty, it would be perfectly: impossible for the farmers, however carefully they might improve their land, to find employment and food for those that would grow up; but when a great number of these parishes are added together in a populous kingdom, the largeness of the subject and the power of moving from place to place obscure and confuse our view. We lose sight of a truth which before appeared completely obvious; and in a most unaccountable manner attribute to the aggregate quantity of land a power of supporting people beyond comparison greater than the sum of all its parts."

In Sweden, in Mr. Malthus day, the inhabitants of the towns were only one-thirtieth part of the whole population; and the mortality, when Malthus wrote, seems to have been as high as one in 35. The proportion of yearly marriages he found, in Sweden, to be about one in 112: varying from one in 100, in good years, to one in 124, in bad ones. When it is remembered that the marriage-rate in Norway was but one in 135, against one in 112 in Sweden, the reason of the high death-rate is at once explained.

As usual, in Europe at that time, however, Swedish legislators were in the habit of endeavouring to increase population in all sorts of foolish ways, as, for instance, by encouraging strangers to settle in the country. Malthus remarks that, by doing so, the Government of Sweden was merely raising the already high death-rate, and not really increasing the population at all.