CHAPTER IV. 



STATISTICS OF BELGIUM. 



Population. 



EVEPtAL Belgian towns Lave lost in population in the course of tlie 

 last three centuries, and the Ardennes are able to support only few- 

 inhabitants ; yet amongst the states of Europe Belgium is the most 

 thickly peopled. If the whole globe were inhabited as densely, its 

 population would number 25 milliards, or about seventeen times 

 more individuals than now. 



Taking the number of men capable of bearing arras as a base for our computa- 

 tion, it will be found that the territory which has now become Belgium contained 

 nearly 500,000 inhabitants when Cœsar invaded it and reduced it to a howling 

 wilderness. Since that time there have been many oscillations, brought about by 

 war, famine, and pestilence. Ever since the creation of the existing kingdom the 

 population has been increasing, except in the year 1847, when typhus carried off 

 thousands in Flanders, and the deaths throughout the kingdom exceeded the 

 births. The increase of population is due almost entirely to an excess of births 

 over deaths, for the number of foreigners residing in the country is small.* The 

 struggle for existence is a sore one in the towns, and foreigners do not care to 

 participate in it. Rather does it happen that Belgians go abroad to improve their 

 condition. Upon the whole, however, they are a sedentary people, and more than 

 a third of them die in the parish in which they were born.f This is all the more 

 curious as the towns exercise the same attraction upon the rural population of 

 Belgium as in other countries. Even now the towns contain about a fourth of 

 the total population, and they increase at a rapid rate, whilst the purely agricul- 

 tural districts are stationary, or even retrograde.+ 



The hygienic conditions are favourable to life in Belgium, the mean age 

 attained being forty or forty-one years, whilst individuals who survive the 



* In 186G there were 58,617 (32,021 French, 20,701 Germans, and 3,003 English). 

 ■* Belgians born in the parish in which they resided : — 1856, 691 per cent. ; 1866, 69-4 per cent. 

 { Increase, 1840 — 75 : — Charleroi (coal mines), 149 per cent. ; Brussels, 86 per cent. ; Liège, 68 per 

 cent. ; Verviers, 60 per cent. ; Mons, 50 per cent. 



