218 Of the Checks to Population in Bk. i. 



should be to the population of France, according 

 to their respective superficies, as 333 to 208, or a 

 little more than 3 to 2. 



The natural tendency to increase is every where 

 so great that it will generally be easy to account 

 for the height, at which the population is found 

 in any country. The more difficult as well as the 

 more interesting part of the inquiry is, to trace the 

 immediate causes, which stop its further progress. 

 The procreative power would, with as much faci- 

 lity, double in twenty-five years the population 

 of China, as that of any of the states of America; 

 but we know that it cannot do this, from the pal- 

 pable inability of the soil to support such an 

 additional number. What then becomes of this 

 mighty power in China? And what are the kinds 

 of restraint, and the forms of premature death, 

 which keep the population down to the level of 

 the means of subsistence ? 



Notwithstanding the extraordinary encourage- 

 ments to marriage in China, we should perhaps 

 be led into an error, if we were to suppose that 

 the preventive check to population does not ope- 

 rate. Duhalde says, that the number of bonzas 

 is considerably above a million, of which there are 

 two thousand unmarried at Pekin, besides three 

 hundred and fifty thousand more in their temples 

 established in different places by the emperor's 

 patents, and that the. literary bachelors alone are 

 about ninety thousand.* 



* Duhalde's China, vol. i. p. 244. 



