their employers. When we consider how low their condition ordinarily is, and how little risk there is of their sinking further, we may fairly conclude that the ordinary morality of the poorer classes in England is due to external preventives, and not to any self-restraint or selfrespect.

The customary food of a people, as it has its effect on the rate of wages, so it powerfully affects the growth of population. As was said before, wheat has been the staple food of the English nation for ages; barley and oats are, or were, the common subsistence of the Scotch; oats and potatoes of the Irish; rye of the eastern nations of Europe; rice of the various Asiatic communities. Now as wages will not, on the whole, descend below the amount necessary to procure this food, so again population will not increase beyond the power of attaining it. If the customary food becomes scarce and dear, a community, if it can do so, will temporarily, may permanently in rare cases, descend to a lower and cheaper kind. In the interval marriage will be checked. It has been noticed over and over again that marriages, and subsequently births, are affected adversely by dear, favourably by cheap years, i. e. by scanty or abundant harvests.

It will be seen, then, that a community which subsists habitually on dear food, is in a position of peculiar advantage when compared with another which lives on cheap food; one for instance which lives on wheat, as contrasted with another which lives on rice or potatoes, and this quite apart from the prudence or incautiousness of the people. Two instances will illustrate this rule. The Irish famine of 1846 was due to the sudden disease which affected the potato. It was equally severe in the

northern part of Scotland, and particularly in the western Highlands; its effects, as we all know, were terrible: but the same disease affected the same plant in England. That, however, which was distress to the English, was death to the Irish and the Highlanders; they had nothing else to resort to; they subsisted on the cheapest food. Now were such a calamity as the potato disease to attack wheat, in England, formidable as the consequences would be, they would not be destructive. The weakest and the poorest would no doubt be sacrificed, but the nation might and would resort to cheaper kinds of food. No doubt the Irish, whose personal morality is high, were exceedingly imprudent. They married on a potatofield, and at a cottier's hut. But, on the other hand, the Belgian peasantry are among the most thrifty in the world. It is a general practice, as I have been informed on the best authority (that of M. Van der Weyer, the late minister for Belgium), for the people of that prosperous country to save half their income. Their diligence is untiring: they have turned sandy wastes into fertile fields. But again, their chief maintenance in the period referred to was roots, and especially potatoes. The distress which they endured was hardly less than that which fell to the lot of the Irish. Famine-struck by the unexpected calamity, these thrifty but starving peasants clamoured at the gates of the Belgian towns for food, and were driven away only by the bayonet. They perished by thousands. Their imprudence consisted in their choice of food. A nation, in short, which is contented to live on cheap food, is always within the risk of famine. The English, who live on wheat, have never endured a real famine since 1315-1316. With the Irish it has been a periodical visita

tion: so it has with the Hindoos, who live on rice and gram. Here the risk is even more imminent, the event more frequent; for drought is a more common phænomenon than was the case with the potato, organic disease in the plant.

During the middle ages the custom of monasticism, and the celibacy of the clergy, formed, we cannot doubt, very effective checks to population. It is not easy to estimate the population of England and Wales up to the middle of the sixteenth century; it was, however, probably not more than 2,000,000. But the monks, nuns, and priests, could not have been much less than a twentieth of the population. They abstained from marriage, but were to a great extent engaged in agriculture and other industrial occupations. When these establishments were broken up, and this remedy for an overplus of population was no longer available, considerable distress ensued. I do not say that it was in any sense caused by the confiscation of the religious houses, but I do not see any reason to doubt that the existing distress was exaggerated by this great social change and its inevitable consequences.

Among the illustrations given of his theory by Mr.. Malthus, was one which has been already alluded to. It was, that food increases in an arithmetical, population in a geometrical ratio. This generality has been adversely commented on, and with justice. The supposed relation is a mere hypothesis. Population cannot, for obvious reasons, increase faster than the means of life. In a rough way, we may say that there are as many people in England as there are quarters of wheat with which to feed them. Population, then, increases with the increase

of quarters of wheat, whether these quarters are grown at home or imported from abroad. Now it is possible to state with tolerable precision what was the general rate of increase five hundred years ago. It was about on the whole one-seventh of that which can be obtained at the present time from equal areas of arable land. The population of England and Wales was not, I have said, more than 2,000,000 from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. At the present time it is ten times that amount. Of these, about 15,000,000 are fed from native produce; the rest subsist on imported food.

Many economists' of great reputation have been concerned at the risk which society runs from the contingency of over-population. The alarm I am persuaded is futile. First, the supply of food is a 'condition precedent,' as lawyers say, to the growth of population itself. Next, the area from which this country can procure food is, day by day, increasing in width. The risk of famine is far more remote than it was fifty or sixty years ago. We draw our supplies of food from all regions. A perpetual harvest contributes to our wants. All over the world corn is being reaped for the necessities of such industries as can exchange the products of their labour for that of the agriculturist. Food is the raw material of labour, and just as cotton and wool and other textile materials are gathered from all quarters of the earth, so is food forthcoming. England, and other great industrial countries, resemble in the density of their population and the necessity of their consumption, when contrasted with those thinly peopled nations of the world from which they draw their supplies of food, great cities surrounded by a fertile plain. Nor is it probable that the supply will be cut off. A

city, to be sure, may be beleaguered by a hostile army, and suffer a famine. So if we had the misfortune or the folly, (both we may hope inconceivable,) to quarrel with the whole civilized world, we might not perhaps be visited by famine, but should certainly be afflicted by dearth. So, again, if the whole available area of the globe were so occupied that the produce of the soil in each country were wholly consumed by its people, densely peopled countries, like populous cities, might starve. But we need contemplate no such contingency. In the first place, it must be ages off; and in the next, fair warning of the event, when ages have past, will be given. To dread such a result is to dread a cataclysm or a glacial epoch, to distress oneself, not only with the sorrows of Hecuba, but with the grief of a future creation.

At the time at which Malthus wrote, there was reason in the alarm. The nation was sunk in penury. A succession of deficient harvests, never, I believe, paralleled since the beginning of the fourteenth century, the period alluded to before, was aggravated by an exhausting foreign war. The only people who prospered were the merchants and manufacturers, for the northern counties were commencing that career of industrial success which has raised this country to the position of the first producer of the world. But the mass of the people had no share in these partial and imperfect benefits. Pauperism was devouring the farmers, the landowners, the retail traders. fiscal system of the country was absolutely destructive. Taxes were imposed on raw materials, and worst of all, prohibitions were put on the importation of that which, as I have said, is the raw material of labour, food. Everybody, with some few exceptions, believed in the necessity

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