Page:PettyWilliam1899EconomicWritingsVol2.djvu/158

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Rapidity of Doubling of People.
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and 30 dying per Annum, and pitch'd upon 40; and I also took the Medium between 24 Births and 23 Burials, and 5 Births for 4 Bu-|15|rials, viz. allowing about 10 Births for 9 Burials; upon which Supposition, there must dye 15 per Annum out of the above-mentioned 600, and the Births must That the time of doubling is here and now 360 Years. be 16 and two Thirds, and the Increase 1, and two Thirds, or five Thirds of a Man, which Number compared with 1800 Thirds, or 600 Men, gives 360 Years for the time of doubling (including some Allowance for Wars, Plagues, and Famine, the Effects thereof, though they be Terrible at the Times and Places where they happen, yet in a period of 360 Years, is no great Matter in the whole Nation. For the Plagues of England in 20 Years hath carried away scarce an Eightieth part of the People of the whole Nation; and the late 10 Years Civil Wars, (the like whereof hath not been in several Ages before) did not take away |16| above a fortieth part of the whole people.)

According to which Account or Measure of doubling, if there be now in England and Wales, 7 Millions 400 Thousand People, there were about 5 Millions 526 Thousand in the beginning of Queen Elizabeths Reign, Anno 1560. and about two Millions at the Norman Conquest, of which Consult the Dooms-day Book, and my Lord Hale's Origination of Mankind[1].

320 Millions now in the World.Memorandum, That if the People double in 360 Years, that the present 320 Millions computed by some Learned Men, (from the Measures of all the Nations of the World, their degrees of being Peopled, and
  1. Petty's allusion to Domesday Book rests, probably, upon such knowledge only as he drew from reading Sir Matthew Hale's The primitive Origination of Mankind considered and examined, (1672). Hale, however, does not estimate the population of England at the time of the Conquest at all. That, he thinks, would be "a labourious piece of work, but it is not difficult to be done in any one County; I have tryed the comparison in the County of Gloucester., and I do find… that the number of inhabitants now are above twenty times more than they were at that time," p. 235. The laborious piece of work has since been performed by Sir Henry Ellis, but the "recorded population" (287,045) must be multiplied "by four, five or six, according to knowledge or taste, before the population of England will be attained."-Maitland, Domesday Book and beyond, 408; cf. pp. 17—22, 400, 437, also Pell in Domesday Studies, 1. 561.