t that a twelfth child has a very
much poorer chance of survival than a first or second. The agitation for
the endowment of motherhood and the reduction of infant mortality is
therefore futile, because, while other conditions remain the same, every
baby 'saved' sends another baby out of the world or prevents him from
coming into it. The number of the people is not determined by
philanthropists or even by parents. Children will come somehow whenever
there is room for them, and go when there is none. But other conditions
do not remain the same, and it is in these other conditions that we must
seek the causes of expansion or contraction in the numbers of a
community.

At the end of the sixteenth century the population of England and Wales
amounted to about five millions, and a hundred years later to about six.
There is no reason to think that under the conditions then existing the
country could have supported a larger number. The birth-rate was kept
high by the pestilential state of the towns, and thus the pressure of
numbers was less felt than it is now, since it was possible to have,
though not to rear, unlimited families. Occasionally, from accidental
circumstances, England was for a short time under-populated, and these
were the periods when, according to Professor Thorold Rogers, Archdeacon
Cunningham, and other authorities, the labourer was well off. The most
striking example was in the half-century after the Black Death, which
carried off nearly half the population. Wages increased threefold, and
the Government tried in vain to protect employers by enforcing
pre-plague rates. Not only were wages high, but food was so abundant
that farmers often gave their men a square meal which was not in the
contract. The other period of prosperity for the working man, according
to our authorities, was the second quarter of the eighteenth century. It
has not, we think, been noticed that this also followed a temporary
set-back in the population. In 1688 the population of England and Wales
was 5,500,520; in 1710 it was more than a quarter of a million less. The
cause of this decline is obscure, but its effects soon showed themselves
in easier conditions of life, especially for the poor. Such periods of
under-saturation, which some new countries are still enjoying, are
necessarily short. Population flows in as naturally as water finds its
level.

It was not till the accession of George III that the increase in our
numbers became ra