hey
found them to be nine hundred thousand of all sorts. This number, by
the ordinary rules of computation, supposes that there were above
two hundred thousand men able to bear arms. Yet even this number is
surprisingly small. Can we suppose that the kingdom is six or seven
times more populous at present? and that Murden's was the real number of
men, excluding Catholics, and children, and infirm persons?

* Lives of the Admirals, vol. i. p. 432.

** Strype, vol. iv. p. 221

*** Page 608.

**** Journ. 25 April 1621.

Harrison says, that in the musters taken in the years 1574 and 1575, the
men fit for service amounted to one million one hundred and seventy-two
thousand six hundred and seventy-four; yet was it believed that a full
third was omitted. Such uncertainty and contradiction are there in all
these accounts.

Notwithstanding the greatness of this number, the same author complains
much of the decay of populousness; a vulgar complaint in all places and
all ages. Guicciardini makes the inhabitants of England in this reign
amount to two millions.

Whatever opinion we may form of the comparative populousness of England
in different periods, it must be allowed that, abstracting from the
national debt, there is a prodigious increase of power in that, more
perhaps than in any other European state, since the beginning of the
last century. It would be no paradox to affirm, that Ireland alone
could, at present, exert a greater force than all the three kingdoms
were capable of at the death of Queen Elizabeth. And we might go
further, and assert, that one good county in England is able to make, at
least to support, a greater effort than the whole kingdom was capable of
in the reign of Henry V.; when the maintenance of a garrison in a small
town like Calais, formed more than a third of the ordinary national
expense. Such are the effects of liberty, industry, and good government!

The state of the English manufactures was at this time very low; and
foreign wares of almost all kinds had the preference.[*] About the year
1590, there were in London four persons only rated in the subsidy books
so high as four hundred pounds.[**] This computation is not indeed to be
deemed an exact estimate of their wealth. In 1567, there were found, on
inquiry, to be four thousand eight hundred and fifty-one strangers
of all nations in London; of whom three thousand eight hundred and
thirty-eight were Flemings, and only