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.10 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 expected in certain cases—­Proportion of births to burials for short periods in any country an inadequate criterion of the real average increase of population—­Best criterion of a permanent increase of population—­Great frugality of living one of the causes of the famines of China and Indostan—­Evil tendency of one of the clauses in Mr Pitt’s Poor Bill—­Only one proper way of encouraging population—­Causes of the Happiness of nations—­ Famine, the last and most dreadful mode by which nature represses a redundant population—­The three propositions considered as established.