897,521 Germany, (including Hungary, Prussian and Austrian
Poland,) 56,136,213 Italy, 20,548,616 Great Britain and Ireland,
24,062,947 Spain and Portugal, 13,953,959. 3,144,000 Russia, including
Poland, 44,220,600 Cracow, 128,480 Turkey, (including Pachalic of
Dschesair,) 9,545,300 Greece, 637,700 Ionian Islands, 208,100 Sweden and
Norway, 3,914,963 Denmark, 2,012,998 Belgium, 3,533,538 Holland,
2,444,550 Switzerland, 985,000. Total, 219,344,116

Since the publication of my first annotated edition of Gibbon, the
subject of the population of the Roman empire has been investigated by
two writers of great industry and learning; Mons. Dureau de la Malle, in
his Economie Politique des Romains, liv. ii. c. 1. to 8, and M. Zumpt,
in a dissertation printed in the Transactions of the Berlin Academy,
1840. M. Dureau de la Malle confines his inquiry almost entirely to
the city of Rome, and Roman Italy. Zumpt examines at greater length
the axiom, which he supposes to have been assumed by Gibbon as
unquestionable, "that Italy and the Roman world was never so populous
as in the time of the Antonines." Though this probably was Gibbon's
opinion, he has not stated it so peremptorily as asserted by Mr. Zumpt.
It had before been expressly laid down by Hume, and his statement was
controverted by Wallace and by Malthus. Gibbon says (p. 84) that there
is no reason to believe the country (of Italy) less populous in the age
of the Antonines, than in that of Romulus; and Zumpt acknowledges that
we have no satisfactory knowledge of the state of Italy at that early
age. Zumpt, in my opinion with some reason, takes the period just before
the first Punic war, as that in which Roman Italy (all south of the
Rubicon) was most populous. From that time, the numbers began to
diminish, at first from the enormous waste of life out of the free
population in the foreign, and afterwards in the civil wars; from the
cultivation of the soil by slaves; towards the close of the republic,
from the repugnance to marriage, which resisted alike the dread of legal
punishment and the offer of legal immunity and privilege; and from the
depravity of manners, which interfered with the procreation, the birth,
and the rearing of children. The arguments and the authorities of Zumpt
are equally conclusive as to the decline of population in Greece.
Still the details, which he himself adduces as to the prosperity and
populousness of Asia Minor, and the whole of the Roman East, wi