APPENDIX. 487 



•manufactories. In looking over them, the reader, without 

 other information, would be disposed to feel considerable 

 alarm at the prospect of depopulation impending over the 

 country; or at least he would be convinced that we were 

 within a hair's breadth of that formidable point of non- 

 repiodnctiou, at which, according to Mr. VVeyland", the 

 population iiatnraUy comes to a full stop before the means 



.of subsistence cease to be progressive. 



' These calculations were certainly as applicable twenty 

 years ago as they are now ; and indeed they are chiefly 

 founded on observations which were made at a greater dis- 

 tance of time than the period here noticed. But what has 



(happened since? In spite of the enlargement of all our 

 towns; in spite of the most rapid increase of manufactories, 

 and of the proportion of people employed in them; in spite 

 of the most extraordinary and unusual demands for the 



' army and navy ; in short, in spite of a state of things which, 



-according to Mr. Weyland's theory, ought to have brought 

 us long since to the point oi non-reproduction, the popula- 

 tion of the country has advanced at a rate more rapid than 

 was ever known at any period of its history. During the 

 ten years from 1 800 to 1811, as I have mentioned in a for- 

 mer part of this work, the population of this country (even 

 after making an allowance for the presumed deficiency of 

 the returns in the tirst enumeration) increased at a rate 

 which would double its numbers in fifty-five years. 



This fact appears to me at once a full and complete refu- 

 tation of the doctrine, that, as society advances, the in- 

 creased indisposition to marriage and increased mortality in 

 great towns and manufactories always overcome the prin- 

 ciple of increase; and that, in the language of Mr. VVeyland, 

 " population, so far from having an inconvenient tendency 

 " uniformly to press against the means of subsistence, be- 

 " comes by degrees very slow in overtaking those means." 



With this acknowledged and glaring fact before him, and 

 with the most striking evidences staring him in the face, that 

 even, during this period of rapid increase, thousands both 

 in the country and in towns were prevented from marrying 

 so early as they would have done, if they had possessed suf- 

 ficient means of supporting a family independently of parish 

 relief, it is quite inconceivable how a man of sense could 

 bewilder himself in such a maze of futile calculations, and 



