1889.] PUBLIC DOCUMENT — No. 4. 337 



imperative necessity for a constant migration. While 

 among our rugged mountain ranges there are fertile valleys 

 and productive hill-sides, yet a limit would long ago have 

 been found, where the productions of the soil would not have 

 been sufficient to supply the wants of that greatly increased 

 population. 



Malthus, a great authority, says : "There is a constant 

 tendency in all animated life to increase beyond the nourish- 

 ment prepared for it. It is observed by Dr. Franklin that 

 there is no bound to the prolific nature of plants and animals 

 but what is made by their crowding and interfering with 

 each other's means of subsistence. Were the face of the 

 earth vacant of other plants, it might be gradually sown and 

 overspread with one kind only ; and, were it empty of other 

 inhabitants, it might in a few ages be replenished from one 

 nation only, — as, for instance, with Englishmen. 



" The great law of necessity, which prevents population 

 from increasing in any country beyond the food which it 

 can either produce or purchase, is a law so obvious and 

 evident to our understandings that we cannot for a moment 

 doubt it. The different modes which nature takes to repress 

 a redundant population do not indeed appear to us so certain 

 and regular ; but, though we cannot always predict the 

 mode, we may with certainty predict the fact. 



"In the northern States of America, where the means of 

 subsistence have been more ample, the manners of the people 

 more pure, and the checks to early marriages fewer than in 

 any of the modern States of Europe, the population has been 

 found to double itself for above a century and a half in less 

 than twenty-five years." 



The learned and accomplished superintendent of the Fed- 

 eral census says that the capabilities of increase in popula- 

 tion have been exhibited, and on a vast scale, under the 

 most favorable conditions for observation, upon the terri- 

 tory of the United States within the past century ; and these 

 capabilities are well understood and susceptible of reduction 

 to at least approximate mathematical statements. In a 

 new community, where land is abundant and fertile, where 

 the occupations of the people are mainly agricultural, where 

 the habits of the people are simple, and the absolute require- 



