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prove a universal law, the induction for which must necessarily be 

 very extensive. With respect to the increase of food in an arith- 

 metical ratio only, it has remained up to the present time little 

 more than an assertion ; no sufficient proofs have been advanced, 

 and in fact everything points against its correctness, and the theory 

 has of late years been softened down to this assertion simply, — 

 that population tends to increase faster than subsistence. But 

 although deprived of the original mathematical certainty, the con- 

 sequences deduced from it remain unaltered. Seeing then that 

 this theory has been the basis of other theories both in political 

 economy and in development it may be interesting to us to enquire 

 how far ancient and modern facts fall in with it as regards 

 approaching over-population. What is known of the population 

 of the world in former times as compared with it at present ? Was 

 it far below ? Was it below it at all ? No doubt much is wrapped 

 in the uncertainty which obscures early times, but this ought to 

 make us hesitate equally in hastily asserting geometrical progres- 

 sion and in rashly denying it. Montesquieu, early in the 18th 

 century, expressed what seems to have been then the received im- 

 pression, that the population of the world had long been declining. 

 Since his time everybody has taken up the opposite opinion. Yet 

 consider for a moment the empires of antiquity, and the enormous 

 populations which must have been necessary to carry out those 

 works of irrigation and architecture, the ruins of which literally 

 cover the face of the earth. We are looking at the world as a 

 whole, not at any limited portion of it. No one will deny that any 

 particular district may be thinly populated at one time and over- 

 crowded at another. Europe is generally pointed out at present 

 as accomplishing the geometrical progression. But after all these 

 centuries of increasing civilisation she does not yet number 86 to 

 square mile. And Asia is not 46. Compare this with Great 

 Britain which numbers 324 to the square mile. The whole world 

 averages 29. The numbers in Asia were once probably very much 

 higher proportionally than in Europe. We have only to glance 

 back over the pages of history to satisfy ourselves that the great 

 centres of population have changed their places repeatedly and 

 rapidly, but they have always been in existence. There is no 

 period of history without its great empires and crowded populations ; 

 and all the signs of pre-historic periods point in the same direction 

 in each hemisphere. Large areas now barren and desolate were 

 once thickly peopled and highly cultivated. Nowhere is this more 

 evident than in west and south-west Asia. The valley of the Syr 

 Daria is said to have been at one time so thickly settled that a 

 nightingale could fly among the fruit trees along its whole distance 

 to the Sea of Aral. The whole country from this river to the Nile 



