the population must be checked; or its standard of comfort must deteriorate; or its accruing surplus must remove.[1] But the first necessitates an artificial and often an unnatural social system, as is said to prevail in France;[2] and the next is an alternative which entails the physical degradation we have seen supervene in Ireland. There remains therefore the third,—a course in perfect harmony with the laws of nature, and one which has already established the religion, the language, and the freedom of England, over one-fourth of the habitable globe. To lament the exhibition of so much enterprise, vital energy, and colonising power, in the race to which we belong,[3] seems to me more
- ↑ "But though improvement may during a certain space of time keep up with, or even surpass, the actual increase of population, it assuredly never comes up to the rate of increase of which population is capable; and nothing could have prevented a general deterioration in the condition of the human race, were it not that population has in fact been restrained. Had it been restrained still more, and the same improvements taken place, there would have been a larger dividend than there now is, for the nation or the species at large."—Ibid. p. 211.
- ↑ "Le Partage forcé affecte à la fois la petite et la grande propriété rurale; il détruit les petits domaínes agglomérês, à familles fécondes, et les remplace par ces petits domaines morcelés où la fécondité conduit fatalement au paupérisme, et où le bien-être des individus se fonde sur la stérilité du mariagé et sur l'egoïsme."—La Reforme Sociale en France, par M. F. le Play, Vol. I. p. 396.
- ↑ Saxon and Celt have taken an equal part in emigration from Ireland.—See Appendix, pp. 41-85.
regards the average condition of the people.—Mill's Political Economy, p. 239.
