Depopulation

“ Famine seems to be the last, the most dreadful resource of nature. The power of population is so superior to the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction; and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague, advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and ten thousands. ”

“ But, unless the kingdom is made a prison to its inhabitants, these migrations cannot be prevented; nor do I think that they have any great tendency to produce depopulation. When a number of people quit a country, there is more employment and greater plenty of the means of subsistence left for those who remain; and the vacancy is soon filled up. The grand causes of depopulation are, not migrations, or even famines and plagues, or any other temporary evils; but the permanent and slowly working evils of debauchery, luxury, high taxes, and oppression. ”

“ With these extraordinary encouragements to population, and every cause of depopulation, as we have supposed, removed, the numbers would necessarily increase faster than in any society that has ever yet been known. ”

“ In the numerous instances of depopulation which occur in history, the causes of it may always be traced to the want of industry, or the ill-direction of that industry, arising from violence, bad government, ignorance, &c. which first occasions a want of food, and of course depopulation follows. When Rome adopted the custom of importing all her corn, and laying all Italy into pasture, she soon declined in population. ”

“ But surely there must be a way, could we but discover it, of imitating the skill and bountifulness of Nature, by creating channels through which some of our population shall be attracted back to the fields; so that there shall be a stream of population pouring from the city into the country, till a healthy balance is restored, and we have solved the twin problems of rural depopulation and of the overcrowded, overgrown city. ”

“ The discouragements to marriage, the consequent vicious habits, war, luxury, the silent though certain depopulation of large towns, and the close habitations, and insufficient food of many of the poor, prevent population from increasing beyond the means of subsistence ”

“ There are doubtless many causes to explain the increase of cities, and the steady depopulation of the country. In a careful estimate, however, it should not be ignored that the farmer relies more and more upon the labor of the few people living upon his farm. ”

“ Poverty has a very sharply-defined history, and that history runs parallel with the history of land. The depopulation of country districts is no accident, it is the direct and inevitable consequence of the disappearance of small holdings. ”

“ The Country deprived of Tillers, by this Expatriation and Inactivity, has yielded nothing; and the Depopulation of the State has daily increased, from the reciprocal and necessary Proportion between Subsistence and Population, and because Agriculture alone can increase Subsistence. ”

“ Let us consider the broad features of the redistribution of the population that has characterised the nineteenth century. It may be summarised as an unusual growth of great cities and a slight tendency to depopulation in the country. The growth of the great cities is the essential phenomenon. ”

“ The obscurity in which the statistics of depopulation are involved does not prevent us from seeing that it played an important part in providing an incentive to the organisation of relief on a national and secular basis, which was the most enduring achievement of the social legislation of sixteenth century statesmen. ”

“ Is it not thus that things happen in our country, which, the statisticians tell us, is threatened with depopulation? The clerk, the artisan, the civil servant, the workman, the small shopkeeper are a daily increasing multitude with us ”

“ In the fifteenth century there was no Government to preserve order, let alone protect the poorer classes. Even if there were, therefore, extensive enclosures producing depopulation, we might very well hear little of them. ”

“ Sometimes, for long periods, we hear little except the stock complaints that tillage and husbandry are declining, to the injury of the State—because it means depopulation. But along with this complaint we are assured that there are too many people in England. And then, on a sudden, we hear of people assembling to break down enclosures. ”

“ In taking a survey of our present condition, we have to think of the poverty of the peasant-class, and closely connected with this question of poverty is the question of village depopulation. The village is the centre of our civilisation and culture ”

“ The poor increase like fleas and lice, and these vermine will eat us up unless we inclose. ... Depopulation comes by degrees, and the next generation usually knows neither Tenant, nor Cottier in such enclosed places, for Towns we must call them no longer. ”

“ It must therefore be admitted that great depopulations are almost irreparable, because a people whose numbers are brought down to a certain point, remains there; and if by chance it recovers itself, it must be the work of ages. ”

“ The globe may be surveyed and history may be reviewed in vain for any instance of a considerable country in which poverty and want can be fairly attributed to the pressure of an increasing population. Whatever be the possible dangers involved in the power of human increase, they have never yet appeared. Whatever may sometime be, this never yet has been the evil that has afflicted mankind. Population always tending to overpass the limit of subsistence! How is it, then, that this globe of ours, after all the millions of years that man has been upon the earth, is yet so thinly populated? ”

“ Over-population in the sense that the whole world is too full to contain its habitants, or that it will ever become too full to contain them, is certainly a fallacy, but overpopulation is a lamentable truth in its relative sense. We find evidences of over-population in every old country of the world. The pest of over-population is the existence of poverty, squalor, wretchedness, disease, ignorance, misery, and crime. Low rate of wages, and food dear, here you have two certain indices of relative over-population. ”

“ It must always have been perfectly well known that population will probably (though not necessarily) increase with every augmentation of the supply of subsistence, and may, in some instances, inconveniently press upon, or even for a certain time exceed, the number properly corresponding to that supply. Nor could it ever have been doubted that war, disease, poverty—the last two often the consequences of vice—are causes which keep population down. ”

“ Thus the war, which was the greatest depopulator since the epidemic of the Middle Ages, caused “only a momentary hesitation in the steady onward march of population growth.” If we take any given land area of fixed limits, there must necessarily be an upper limit to the number of people it can support, but this limit will be approached asymtotically and the most rapid rise will be midway between the upper and lower limit, namely, at that point where half the possible resources of subsistence have been drawn upon and utilized. ”

“ Decline in the agricultural population.2. The shifting of population from agricultural to urban districts has been due partly to the opening up of virgin soils all over the world, partly to the cheapening of the means of communication, but also in large measure to Free Trade. The decline in the agricultural population must entail in time a decline in the strength of the race; for it is from the agricultural population that the best fighting material is drawn and the urban population recruited. ”

“ Were there no other depopulating causes, every country would, without doubt, be subject to periodical pestilences or famines.
The only true criterion of a real and permanent increase in the population of any country, is the increase of the means of subsistence. But even this criterion is subject to some slight variations, which are, however, completely open to our view and observations. In some countries population appears to have been forced; that is, the people have been habituated by degrees to live almost upon the smallest possible quantity of food. ”

“ All may determine their conduct by the consideration of the present only. All are at liberty to follow the bent of their inclinations in an early marriage. But, as we have already seen, it is impossible to provide an adequate supply of food for all who can be born. Hence, supposing the form of the society to remain, the shares of subsistence are continually diminishing, until all are reduced to extreme distress, and until, ultimately, the further increase of population is repressed by the undisguised check of misery and want. ”

“ This remedy will always be resorted to in highly civilized nations, as the pressure of population on subsistence becomes more severe. But the decrease of population means the arrest of growth and progress in the national organism, and eventual decadence. ”

“ But the pressure on the means of subsistence has other consequences than the living on unwholesome food. One of the earliest signs of too rapidly increasing population is the overcrowding of the poor. ”

“ In a country even thinly inhabited, if an increase of population take place, before more food is raised, and more houses are built, the inhabitants must be distressed in some degree for room and subsistence. ”

“ If the population continued to increase at the same rate, a time would soon arrive when no one would have more than mere necessaries, and, soon after, a time when no one would have a sufficiency of those, and the further increase of population would be arrested by death. ”

“ It is apparently corroborated by many obvious facts, such as the prevalence of poverty, vice and misery amid dense populations, the general effect of material progress in increasing population without relieving pauperism, the rapid growth of numbers in newly settled countries and the evident retardation of increase in more densely settled countries by the mortality among the class condemned to want. ”

“ You have been deploring the decrease in the birth-rate in your country, apparently because it places you, as regards population, in an inferior position to other countries, the inhabitants of which may at some time become your enemies. Yet, at the same time, you have told us that a very large number of your people are living in poverty and misery, that the population is too numerous for work to be found for all, and that many, being unable to find a living in their own country, have gone out, or been sent out, to distant lands. ”

“ I should expect, therefore, that those countries where subsistence was increasing sufficiently at times to encourage population but not to answer all its demands, would be more subject to periodical epidemics than those where the population could more completely accommodate itself to the average produce. ”