e
comparative strength of the religious sects into which the community
was divided. An inquiry was instituted; and reports were laid before
him from all the dioceses of the realm. According to these reports the
number of his English subjects must have been about five million two
hundred thousand. [31]

Lastly, in our own days, Mr. Finlaison, an actuary of eminent skill,
subjected the ancient parochial registers of baptisms, marriages, and
burials, to all the tests which the modern improvements in statistical
science enabled him to apply. His opinion was, that, at the close of the
seventeenth century, the population of England was a little under five
million two hundred thousand souls. [32]

Of these three estimates, framed without concert by different persons
from different sets of materials, the highest, which is that of King,
does not exceed the lowest, which is that of Finlaison, by one twelfth.
We may, therefore, with confidence pronounce that, when James the Second
reigned, England contained between five million and five million five
hundred thousand inhabitants. On the very highest supposition she then
had less than one third of her present population, and less than three
times the population which is now collected in her gigantic capital.

The increase of the people has been great in every part of the kingdom,
but generally much greater in the northern than in the southern shires.
In truth a large part of the country beyond Trent was, down to the
eighteenth century, in a state of barbarism. Physical and moral causes
had concurred to prevent civilisation from spreading to that region. The
air was inclement; the soil was generally such as required skilful and
industrious cultivation; and there could be little skill or industry in
a tract which was often the theatre of war, and which, even when
there was nominal peace, was constantly desolated by bands of Scottish
marauders. Before the union of the two British crowns, and long after
that union, there was as great a difference between Middlesex and
Northumberland as there now is between Massachusetts and the settlements
of those squatters who, far to the west of the Mississippi, administer a
rude justice with the rifle and the dagger. In the reign of Charles the
Second, the traces left by ages of slaughter and pillage were distinctly
perceptible, many miles south of the Tweed, in the face of the country
and in the lawless manners of the people. There was still a la