antile disease, often by
wholesale famine and pestilence; and left, on the whole, only those of
the strongest constitutions to perpetuate a hardy, valiant, and
enterprising race.

At last came a sudden and unprecedented change. In the first years of
the century, steam and commerce produced an enormous increase in the
population. Millions of fresh human beings found employment, married,
brought up children who found employment in their turn, and learnt to
live more or less civilised lives. An event, doubtless, for which God is
to be thanked. A quite new phase of humanity, bringing with it new vices
and new dangers: but bringing, also, not merely new comforts, but new
noblenesses, new generosities, new conceptions of duty, and of how that
duty should be done. It is childish to regret the old times, when our
soot-grimed manufacturing districts were green with lonely farms. To
murmur at the transformation would be, I believe, to murmur at the will
of Him without whom not a sparrow falls to the ground.

"The old order changeth, yielding place to the new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."

Our duty is, instead of longing for the good old custom, to take care of
the good new custom, lest it should corrupt the world in like wise. And
it may do so thus:--

The rapid increase of population during the first half of this century
began at a moment when the British stock was specially exhausted; namely,
about the end of the long French war. There may have been periods of
exhaustion, at least in England, before that. There may have been one
here, as there seems to have been on the Continent, after the Crusades;
and another after the Wars of the Roses. There was certainly a period of
severe exhaustion at the end of Elizabeth's reign, due both to the long
Spanish and Irish wars and to the terrible endemics introduced from
abroad; an exhaustion which may have caused, in part, the national
weakness which hung upon us during the reign of the Stuarts. But after
none of these did the survival of the less fit suddenly become more easy;
or the discovery of steam power, and the acquisition of a colonial
empire, create at once a fresh demand for human beings and a fresh supply
of food for them. Britain, at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
was in an altogether new social situation.

At the beginning of the great French war; and, indeed, ever since the
beginning