undertaken: we have heard of poll-taxes, hearth-money, the pressing of seamen, and the drawings for the militia; and the recollection of such measures would make many an honest Englishman answer shyly to a question, respecting all the inhabitants of his household. In 1811, the business would sit more easy on the public mind; it would have been found to be harmless in its results: and this writer, therefore, thinks it very conceivable that there was not one human creature more in the country in 1811 than in 1801. Most surprising is it, however, that the very calculations which preceding writers have made to prove the supposed increase of our population, in confirmation of the returns of 1801 and 1811, should be grossly inconsistent with these returns; and prove, as far as contradiction can, that we have no scientific data on the subject. Mr. Rickman, for instance, constructs a table of the population of England and Wales throughout the last century, on a comparison of the baptisms and population of 1801. His problem is: "If 263,409, the average number for the five years preceding 1801, were produced from a population of 9,168,000, from what population were 157,307, the baptisms of 1700, produced?" and the registered baptisms furnish, on this calculation, the following

Table of the Population of England and Wales throughout the last Century.

But this same writer has shown us, by the actual register of marriages and births compared, in the last table, that during

nearly one half of this supposed period of doubling our population, the births, in their proportion to marriages, were actually stationary. It is remarkable also, that the burials, during twenty-one years of the same period, namely, from 1780 to 1800 inclusive, were also stationary, or averaged from first to last about 192,000 per annum ; and that for five years out of the last ten of the supposed increase, i. e. from 1805 to 1810, they were but 196,000 *. The calculation of the past numbers of our countrymen, by the hearth-books, in like manner contradicts the above table. According to the latter, in 1700, England and Wales contained but 5,475,000 inhabitants; but, in 1690, we have an account of 1,319,215 houses; and the houses of 1811 were 1,848,524, giving, on the comparison of houses and population, in 1690, 7,475,000 inhabitants.

Book III., of Mr. Godwin's work, inquires into the causes by which the amount of the numbers of mankind is reduced or restrained; or what his opponent has called the "checks" upon population. Mankind are kept down, we were almost about to say, infinitely within the limits of Mr. Malthus's calculations. That writer boldly assumes, that nature," the laws of nature," impel population forward to that extreme pressure against the means of subsistence, of which vice and misery are the only efficient restraints. We have already noticed his checks in detail. Our author having first put the fact of population having been kept down, in all countries with which we are acquainted, below the only known example of increase, in Sweden, proposes the two questions, "How is it kept down?" and, "Is it necessary for the common good, that any special attention should be given by governments and national councils, in the way of taking care that it should be kept down, or that the increase of mankind should not be encouraged?" He admits that vice, and the visitation of calamity, have their share in keeping down the numbers of mankind; ranking war, as every considerate man must, amongst the most conspicuous of the one class of checks; and pestilence and famine, as the most obvious ones amongst the other. But he totally rejects Mr. Malthus's "vice and misery in their obscure details," because we have no knowledge of their greater prevalence in the countries of Europe, where, according to that writer, they commit such enormous havoc, than in the United States of America, where his

* See the Population Abstract, edited by Mr. Rickman.

favourite geometrical ratio prevails. The proper and ultimate appeal, as he observes, is to bills of mortality; and until these furnish the data of such havoc, we think the negative argument of Mr. Godwin is irresistible. They are not the prodigious checks upon population, which his opponent would make them; for it is not to be forgotten, that they must be such comparatively to establish Mr. Malthus's system: they must exist in such palpable proportions in Europe, when compared with America, as to confine that which is proceeding upon a geometrical, within an arithmetical ratio. But where is the evidence of this?

Secondly, Mr. Godwin asks, Does population require to be kept down? It is wholly contrary to the spirit of ancient legislation to suppose so-wholly absurd, he insists, in reason; since the first element of civilization lies in this truth, that every human creature, except in cases of extraordinary imbecility, is endowed by nature with the power of producing a much greater quantity of that which nourishes human life than is necessary for his individual subsistence—and wholly opposed to ancient and modern experience on the point: those countries, on the whole, having been uniformly found the happiest, where the increase of mankind has been most encouraged; and those most miserable, in which a tendency to depopulation has been displayed.

"true

It is amongst the paradoxes involved in Mr. Malthus's system, "That the proportion of births to marriages in a country forms no criterion by which to judge of the increase or decrease of its numbers"-taking marriage (as all these writers very properly do) for the only source of human offspring.' If the proportion of births to marriages do not increase, our author asks, in what way can population be increased? We imagine that Mr. Malthus. must intend to speak of the permanent increase of mankind -that being born on a geometrical ratio, they die off into other proportions of increase or decrease, as his supposed checks are found to operate; and that hence the mere numbers of the born will not decide the question. Of the details furnished by experience against this system, there is not a more important fact than Mr. Godwin produces, respecting the calculation of annuities, and the value of life. These proceed upon the negative, in limine, of Mr. Malthus's conclusions; and have been in the most successful operation throughout the civilized world, during the

very periods of his wonder-working increase," by procreation only," in America and Great Britain. The merchants and financiers of all countries refer to our Price and Morgan, on these subjects; and in America, where the value of life, particularly in young persons, must be DOUBLE, according to Mr. Malthus, such a circumstance is not suspected: though were it indeed the fact, certain ruin would attend all extensive assurances effected on the basis of the European tables.

Book IV. is devoted to the consideration of the important case of America. Mr. Godwin, perhaps, a little anticipates the point he has to establish, when he says, that he has "already sufficiently proved, so far as can be inferred from all the documents that have yet been collected respecting the supposed increase of mankind, that the augmentation of numbers in the United States of America, to whatever it may amount, cannot have arisen from their own proper resources in the way of procreation." But he endeavours, not unsuccessfully, to show how it has arisen. He reminds us of the topography and political condition of the United States-their facilities for receiving, sustaining, and making happy (!) the discontented and the destitute; and traces the history of those extensive emigrations thither, to which he principally attributes the surprising increase in their population. Proceeding to the tables and figures of the subject, we find that Pitkin's Statistical View of the United States gives us the following sketch of the progress of their population:

On Mr. Godwin's hypothesis, 165,000 emigrants must have passed over annually from Europe to America, during the twenty years which elapsed between 1790 and 1810, with one important limitation. Emigrants, according to this writer, consist generally of families in the flower of their lives, of those who have past the dangerous period of childhood; and of whom, instead of reckoning, as in other cases, that out of four children born we can only expect one child-bearing female; we may, in this case, expect the proportion of two to four. Hence he infers that the annual number of emigrants necessary, according to his principles," to increase the numbers of the United States' population, as they have been reported to increase, for the twenty years specified, is only from 80 to 90,000. Now there is

on record an account of 21,200 British subjects having passed from Great Britain to New England alone, between the years 1630 and 1640; a period in which the tonnage of our merchant ships did not exceed 142,900 tons. "The fever of emigration," as Johnson called it, has certainly spread on every side of us, and over an increased population since moreover, our state physicians have prescribed for the malady, and pointed out those portions of the body politic on which it may beneficially operate:our merchant tonnage now is 3,072,409, yielding, according to the ancient ratio, an emigration of 43,000 persons from Great Britain only. When to these are added the large numbers of emigrants that are known to have proceeded from Ireland and other parts of Europe, Mr. Godwin insists, that we shall have, in the whole, as great a number as any hypothesis on the subject can require*.

Mr. Godwin goes to the core of the matter, as far as he has data, when he comes to the consideration of the amount of births, the periods of marriage, and the diseases prevalent in the United States. In a paper communicated to the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, he traces an arithmetical error (oh! the stubbornness of figurest) the rectification of which singularly corroborates the general or European calculation of the proportion of births to marriages, i. e. an average of from 4 to 44. But he supplies two valuable fragments of calculations, (we call them so in proportion to the magnitude of the question they are brought forward to illustrate, and in our own anxious desire to see more of such documents given to the world,) of which he must give his own account:

"Since writing the above, I have had transmitted to me by my valued friend, Mr. Joseph Valence Bevan, of Georgia, reports of the marriages and births in Portsmouth, the capital of New Hampshire, for six years, from 1804 to 1809, drawn up and published on the spot by Dr. Lyman Spalding. These are the more important, as they relate to those northern states of America

Since this article has been in progress through the press, we have had the pleasure of seeing a schedule, under a new population act, in circulation in the neighbourhood of London. It requires the sex, ages (by gradations of five years) and occupations of the inhabitants to be distinguished, with the returning housekeeper's name.

+A Mr. Barton tells us of the United States possessing, in" a superior degree, an inherent, radical, and lasting source of national vigour and greatness;"" since in no other part of the world is the progress of popu lation so rapid;" and quotes, as a proof of it, the birth of 2,247 children from 521 marriages, which, he says, "gives a proportion of six and a quarter births to a marriage."