millions of Chinamen should not pass over into Borneo, as freely as they transferred themselves to Siam or to Szechuen, and make themselves new homes a little outside of the empire as well as within it. Englishmen never dream of settling in Ireland, though Ireland has sometimes offered very good openings. They will have a warmer welcome and more chance of bettering themselves in America or Australia. As the provinces of China fill up gradually, that great displacement of the population which has been going on within the empire is bound to die out, and men who have to carve out new homes will naturally seek the countries where there is waste land.[1]
It is, no doubt, matter of extreme difficulty to predict what the rate of increase in any particular country, or at any given time, will be. Gibbon has estimated the number of Roman subjects under Claudius at 120,000,000.[2] If this population had doubled once in every 150 years, it would long ago have reached a total which no one supposes the world capable of maintaining. As a fact, the population of the countries that constituted the empire is not more than about 200,000,000.[3] Misgovernment, war, and pestilence
- ↑ It may be noticed that there is one strong reason in the genius of the Chinese people to limit fresh settlement within the empire, at least in districts that have already been settled. "Immense tracts in the north and west of the province (Yunnan) have lain waste since the Mahommedan rebellion, and owing to the antipathy of the Chinese to settle on lands which they look upon as the property of people who may still be living, or whose descendants may still be living, it must be many years before the agriculture of the province is properly developed." Hosie's Three Years in Western China, pp. 205, 206.
- ↑ Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. ii.
- ↑ The countries reckoned in are: Italy, 29,000,000; France, 37,000,000; Belgium and Holland, 10,000,000; Great Britain, 33,000,000; Spain and Portugal, 21,000,000; Turkey in Europe, 15,500,000; Hungary, Dalmatia, and Bosnia, 17,250,000; Turkey in Asia, 16,000,000; and North Africa, 14,000,000; altogether about 202,000,000.
