t the demands for food that can be made upon it by
man. But we should be led into an error if we were thence to suppose
that population and food ever really increase in the same ratio. The
one is still a geometrical and the other an arithmetical ratio, that
is, one increases by multiplication, and the other by addition. Where
there are few people, and a great quantity of fertile land, the power
of the earth to afford a yearly increase of food may be compared to a
great reservoir of water, supplied by a moderate stream. The faster
population increases, the more help will be got to draw off the water,
and consequently an increasing quantity will be taken every year. But
the sooner, undoubtedly, will the reservoir be exhausted, and the
streams only remain. When acre has been added to acre, till all the
fertile land is occupied, the yearly increase of food will depend upon
the amelioration of the land already in possession; and even this
moderate stream will be gradually diminishing. But population, could it
be supplied with food, would go on with unexhausted vigour, and the
increase of one period would furnish the power of a greater increase
the next, and this without any limit.)

These facts seem to shew that population increases exactly in the
proportion that the two great checks to it, misery and vice, are
removed, and that there is not a truer criterion of the happiness and
innocence of a people than the rapidity of their increase. The
unwholesomeness of towns, to which some persons are necessarily driven
from the nature of their trades, must be considered as a species of
misery, and every the slightest check to marriage, from a prospect of
the difficulty of maintaining a family, may be fairly classed under the
same head. In short it is difficult to conceive any check to population
which does not come under the description of some species of misery or
vice.

The population of the thirteen American States before the war was
reckoned at about three millions. Nobody imagines that Great Britain is
less populous at present for the emigration of the small parent stock
that produced these numbers. On the contrary, a certain degree of
emigration is known to be favourable to the population of the mother
country. It has been particularly remarked that the two Spanish
provinces from which the greatest number of people emigrated to
America, became in consequence more populous. Whatever was the original
number of British emigrant