POPULATION. FREQUENT DEARTHS. 783 



cause. But I do not find, except fitfully and in a few lo- 

 calities, that agriculture made progress. I cannot indeed quite 

 accept Gregory King's estimate 1 , who makes the produce of 

 arable land, one kind of grain with another, not much over 

 eleven bushels to the acre; but I am quite convinced that, 

 generally speaking, agriculture, for reasons which I shall 

 allege in the following chapter, made but little progress. If 

 Gregory King be accurate, the agriculture of the seventeenth 

 was not much more successful than that of the fourteenth 

 century. 



Now population will increase if the working classes are 

 deliberately made miserable. This happened in England in 

 the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and happened in 

 Ireland up to recent times. Population will increase if there 

 be a demand for labour, especially the labour of the young, 

 even though the means of life are by no means proportionately 

 increased. And if population increases, and the means of life 

 do not increase in a similar ratio, the price of the necessaries of 

 life may be due to other causes than the plenty or scarcity of 

 money, and we may have to seek for other causes of height- 

 ened prices than movements of bullion. But I shall revert 

 to this topic below. 



Nothing has struck me more in looking over the prices of 

 corn in the seventeenth century, than the prolonged and serious 

 dearths which mark it. I do not pretend that I have dis- 

 covered, in this record of 444 continuous harvests, anything 

 which can indicate the cycle of the seasons. But I have 

 never noticed in any earlier century such a continuity of 

 dearth, as from 1630 to 1637, from 1646 to 1651, from 1658 to 

 1 66 1, from 169310 1699, in each case inclusive. Continuous 

 periods of famine like these have heightened the average of 

 the century. Gregory King takes the normal price of wheat 

 to be 28 s. a quarter. My averages prove that for the century 

 it was 41 s. Now it will be obvious to every one, that if the 



1 Davenant'* Works, vol. ii. p. 217. It is noteworthy that King doe* not 

 mention any root crops whatever. 



