CHAP. xxi. INCREASE OF WEALTH. 135 



value which they may cause in other commodities, 

 amount to a hundredth part of the wealth of a 

 country, and in a prosperous state they will bear 

 a much less proportion. The possession of them 

 is real wealth only in a small degree, though 

 every addition to them produces real wealth by 

 the stimulus which the apparent advance of prices 

 gives to every kind of industrious exertion. 



It is impossible to collect any accurate ideas of 

 the proportionate increase of commodities in ge- 

 neral. An approximation only to accuracy can be 

 expected, and that with faint hopes of success. 



Between the reign of Elizabeth, which termi- 

 nated near the end of the sixteenth century, and 

 that of William, which ended nearly one hundred 

 years later, there had been an increase in popu- 

 lation in England as well as in the other countries 

 of Europe. The inhabitants of England and Wales 

 are calculated by Mr. Rickman to have been in 

 the year 1700 about five million four hundred and 

 seventy-five thousand, and to have increased in 

 the course of the following century at the rate of 

 seventy per cent. As we have found, by the two 

 censuses taken since that of 1801, that our popu- 

 lation has increased at a greater rate than in the 

 last century, so it seems natural to calculate that 

 it had increased more rapidly in the seventeenth 

 than in the sixteenth. We therefore assume a 

 lower rate, and, estimating the population in the 

 year 1500 at three million eight hundred thou- 



