only one-fifth of the total mortality was among persons under fifteen. Such were the results of what Mr. Malthus considered as the only true "moral restraint," late marriages. All these calculations of M. Muret imply the operation of the preventive check to population in a very great degree in the Canton de Vaud. In the town of Berne, the proportion of unmarried persons, including widowsand widowers, was considerably above the half of the adults, and the proportion of the living below sixteen to those above was nearly as 1 to 3 in the beginning of this century. The peasants in Berne were noted for comfort and wealth, doubtless owing to the low birth-rate in that country. A law there prevented those who had no means from marrying.

Mr. Malthus gives an amusing account of a conversation he had with a peasant who went with him from the Lac de Joux to the sources of the river Orbe. This man said that the habit if early marriage might be really said to be the vice of the country and he was so strongly impressed with the necessary and unavoidable wretchedness that must result from it, that he thought a law ought to be made restricting men from entering into the married state before they were forty years of age, and then allowing it only with old maids, who might bear them two or three children instead of six or eight. That peasant would have been, we doubt not, one of the most zealous advocates of the two children system, so wonderfully carred out in many of the most flourishing districts of France, and probably would have abandoned all desire to keep prudent couples like those in these French districts from marrying. We hold with that simple peasant of the Jura, who had learnt the truths he expounded by sad and cruel experience, he having married himself when very young, and with his family, suffered much from poverty, that governments are culpable when they do not attempt to lessen high birth-rates. To forbid early marriage, indeed, is to encourage prostitution and cause many other evils; but to affix a stigma on those who produce large families is, as far as we can see, a plan which can only produce good and need produce no evil results. It is an utter misunderstanding of the rights of the individual to suppose that each man and woman ought to have the right to cause misery to their unfortunate children, and at the same time produce a pressure upon the powers of the soil and lessen the productive powers of past and present labour. That this will ere long be seen to be the truth arising out of the discoveries of the great English professor we cannot for a moment doubt.

IN

CHAPTER V.

OF THE CHECKS TO POPULATION IN FRANCE.

N the sixth chapter of Book II., Mr. Malthus gives us some account of the checks to population which existed in France at the end of last century, which might convince the most sceptical of modern pessimists of the vast strides which a nation may take in a short period towards the attainment of comfort and well-being.

The population of France, before the beginning of the war, says Malthus, was estimated by the Constituent Assembly at 261 millions. Necker estimated the yearly births, in 1780, to be above a million, and it is curious, as we shall soon see, that France, in 1874, had not a million of births with a population of 36 millions. Malthus estimated that, out of that million, 600,000 would attain the age of 18; and, considering that nearly as many persons are to be found in a given society, unmarried as married, he amply accounts for the seeming paradox that, whilst France was supposed to have lost 2 millions by actual war and its consequences, at the time of the Revolution, the population was found to have increased, in 1800, as compared with 1790.

"At all times," says Malthus, "the number of small farmers and proprietors in France was great: and though such a state of things is by no means favourable to the clear surplus produce or disposable wealth of a nation, yet sometimes it is not unfavourable to the absolute produce, and it has always a tendency to encourage population." This last remark of Mr. Malthus has not been verified. In no country does the population tend to increase so slowly as in modern France-the land par excellence of peasant proprietors. In all probability, the rapid increase of population at the time of the French Revolution arose from the lower death-rate which always follows a sudden amelioration of the position of the humbler classes, such as that which took place where landed property came into their possession.

The average proportion of births to population in all France, before the Revolution was, according to Necker, 39 per 1000. It has singularly altered since that time, and is now only 26 per 1,000, or the lowest birth-rate in Europe. The death-rate

then was 33 per 1,000, and has fallen of late to 21 per 1,000, or nearly the lowest death-rate in Europe.

Sir Francis d'Ivernois, in a work entitled Tableau des Pertes, has the following remark: "Those have yet to learn the first principles of political arithmetic, who imagine that it is in the field of battle and the hospitals, that an account can be taken of the lives which a revolution or a war has cost. The number of men it has killed is of much less importance than the number of children which it has prevented, and will still prevent, from coming into the world." To this Mr. Malthus replies: "And yet if the circumstances on which the foregoing reasonings are founded should turn out to be true, it will appear that France has not lost a single birth by the revolution. She has the most just reason to mourn the two millions and a half of individuals which she may have lost, but not their posterity: because, if those individuals had remained in the country, a proportionate number of children born of other parents, which are now living in France, would not have come into existence. If in the best governed country in Europe we were to mourn the posterity which is prevented from coming into being, we should always wear the habit of grief."

It is evident," he continues, "that the constant tendency of the births in every country to supply the vacancies made by death, cannot, in a moral point of view, afford the slightest shadow of excuse for the wanton sacrifice of men. The positive evil that is committed in this case, the pain, misery, and wide-spreading desolation and sorrow, that are occasioned to the existing inhabitants, can by no means be counterbalanced by the consideration that the numerical breach in the population will be rapidly repaired. We can have no other right, moral or political, except that of the most urgent necessity, to exchange the life of beings in the full vigour of their enjoyments for an equal number of helpless infants."

The next passage shows how immensely ameliorated is the condition of modern France, as compared with that before the Revolution. "At all times," says our author, "the number of males of a military age in France was small in proportion to the population, on account of the tendency to marriage (1 to 113 of the population, according to Necker), and the great number of children. Necker takes particular notice of this cirHe observes that the effect of the very great misery of the peasantry is to produce a dreadful mortality of infants under three or four years of age and the consequence is that the number of young children will always be in too

cumstance.

great a proportion to the number of grown-up people. A million of individuals, he justly observes, will, in this case, neither present the same military force, nor the same capacity of labour, as an equal number of individuals in a country where the people are less miserable. Switzerland, before the Revolution, could have brought into the field, or have employed in labour appropriate to grown-up persons, one-third more in proportion to her population, than France at the same period."

How strikingly all this has been altered by the prudent habits with regard to families, induced by the peasant holdings in France, is clearly seen by the following statistics:-Between the ages of 20 and 60 the human frame is most capable of production, and, according to Kolb, there are in 10,000 persons in the several States in Europe the following numbers of persons of the productive ages: In France, 5,373; in Holland, 4,964; in Sweden, 4,954; in Great Britain, 4,732; and in the United States, 4,396. France has, of all nations in Europe, the highest average of ages of the living. Thus it is there 31.06 years; in Holland, 27.76; in Sweden, 27.66; in Great Britain, 26.56; and in the United States, 23.10. And in France there are a greater number of persons who attain to old age than in any other country, for, out of 100 deaths there are, in France, over the age of sixty, 36; in Switzerland, 34; in England, 30; in Belgium, 28; in Wurtemburg, 21; in Prussia, 19; and in Austria, 17.

But the most notable of all the facts of modern Europe is that marriages are more prevalent in proportion to population in France than elsewhere, and, curiously, there is the smallest number of illegitimate births. Thus, the illegitimate births in France were, from 1825-67, only 7.27 per cent. of all births, whilst in Prussia they were 8.24 per cent. in 1867; in Sweden they were 10 per cent.; in Austria, 11; and in Bavaria, in 1868, even 22 per cent. of all births. Paris is an exception to this, for the illegitimate births there are about one-fourth of all births.

France had, in 1867, a mortality of only 1 in 44.24 persons; whilst in Prussia the death-rate was 1 in 33.88, in Austria 1 in 29.72, in Holland 1 in 36.25, and in Bavaria 1 in 34.65 inhabitants. And here again is a striking contrast of modern France with the country of the days of Necker. France has now the lowest birth-rate of Europe. There is but one birth annually there in 39 inhabitants, whilst in Prussia there is one birth in 25-47; in Holland 1 in 29; in Austria 1 in

26; in England 1 in 28 inhabitants. According to an article by M. Bertillon on Marriage, in 1877, the average family to a marriage in France is at present only 3; against 4.68 in Germany, 3.96 in Russia, 4:35 in Spain, and 4.25 in England. This is what has been recently styled in Europe the "two (or rather three) Children System of the French." When we hear of the absurdly high birth-rate of 4.68 of Germany, need we wonder that the death-rate in many German towns sometimes amounts to one-half of all born in the first year of life?

France had, in 1872, a population of 36,102,921, and the number of births with this population (966,001) did not come up to what it was in the days of Necker, when the population was only 261 millions. And whilst the population of the United Kingdom, according to our Registrar-General, is increasing at the rate of 1,173 a day, of which about 700 are left to swell the home population, the surplus of births over deaths in France is generally not much more than some 60,000 persons annually added to her population, so that it would take some 300 years for that country to double at its present rate.

As a consequence of our great birth-rate, 36 per 1,000, there is naturally a great emigration, amounting, as the RegistrarGeneral tells us, to some 468 persons daily from these shores on an average, an emigration which, as it has been mainly masculine, has left us a surplus of nearly one million of women in these islands. In France there is no great need for emigration; and hence but little takes place; whilst, so contented are the peasant proprietors with their homes, that, in 1872, it was found that of the 36 millions of France 30 millions were born within the registration districts. This fact accounts for the continuance of a Republic in France. Poverty is the cause of the ruin of Republics.

We add a few passages from a recent author to show how great a step has been taken by the inhabitants of many parts of France towards the removal of that terrible indigence which is found in most European countries, and even in less favoured districts in France.

In an article on Auvergne, written in 1874 and contained in his work entitled Essays in Political and Moral Philosophy, which appeared last year, Mr. Cliffe Leslie makes the following remarks: "The minute subdivision of land during the last 25 years in the Limagne, whatever may be its tendencies for good or evil in manners and other respects, assuredly cannot be ascribed to over-population, once regarded in England as the inevitable consequence of the French law of succession.