s that increased so fast in the North
American Colonies, let us ask, why does not an equal number produce an
equal increase in the same time in Great Britain? The great and obvious
cause to be assigned is the want of room and food, or, in other words,
misery, and that this is a much more powerful cause even than vice
appears sufficiently evident from the rapidity with which even old
states recover the desolations of war, pestilence, or the accidents of
nature. They are then for a short time placed a little in the situation
of new states, and the effect is always answerable to what might be
expected. If the industry of the inhabitants be not destroyed by fear
or tyranny, subsistence will soon increase beyond the wants of the
reduced numbers, and the invariable consequence will be that population
which before, perhaps, was nearly stationary, will begin immediately to
increase.

The fertile province of Flanders, which has been so often the seat of
the most destructive wars, after a respite of a few years, has appeared
always as fruitful and as populous as ever. Even the Palatinate lifted
up its head again after the execrable ravages of Louis the Fourteenth.
The effects of the dreadful plague in London in 1666 were not
perceptible fifteen or twenty years afterwards. The traces of the most
destructive famines in China and Indostan are by all accounts very soon
obliterated. It may even be doubted whether Turkey and Egypt are upon
an average much less populous for the plagues that periodically lay
them waste. If the number of people which they contain be less now than
formerly, it is, probably, rather to be attributed to the tyranny and
oppression of the government under which they groan, and the consequent
discouragements to agriculture, than to the loss which they sustain by
the plague. The most tremendous convulsions of nature, such as volcanic
eruptions and earthquakes, if they do not happen so frequently as to
drive away the inhabitants, or to destroy their spirit of industry,
have but a trifling effect on the average population of any state.
Naples, and the country under Vesuvius, are still very populous,
notwithstanding the repeated eruptions of that mountain. And Lisbon and
Lima are now, probably, nearly in the same state with regard to
population as they were before the last earthquakes.

CHAPTER 7

A probable cause of epidemics--Extracts from Mr Suessmilch's
tables--Periodical returns of sickly seasons to be