ny physical, moral, or psychological change
came over the nation coincidently with the inventions of the
spinning-jenny and the steam-engine. It is too obvious for dispute that
it was the possession of capital wanting employment, and of natural
advantages for using it, that called these multitudes of human beings
into existence, to eat the food which they paid for by their labour. And
it should be equally obvious that the existence of forty-six millions of
people upon 121,000 square miles of territory depends entirely upon our
finding a market for our manufactures abroad, for so only are we able to
pay for the food of the people. It is most unfortunate that these
exports must, with our present population, include coal, which, if we
had any thought for posterity, we should guard jealously and use
sparingly; for in five hundred years at the outside our stock will be
gone, and we shall sink to a third-rate Power at once. We are
sacrificing the future in order to provide for an excessive and
discontented population in the present. During the present century we
have begun to be conscious that our foreign trade is threatened; and so
sensitive is the birth-rate to economic conditions that it has begun to
curve very slightly downward in relation to the death-rate, instead of
descending with it in parallel lines.[23] This may be partly due to the
curtailment of facilities for emigration, owing to the filling up of the
new countries. For emigration does not diminish the population of the
country which the emigrants leave; it only increases its birth-rate.

We are now in a position to enumerate the causes which actually lead to
an increase in the population of a country. The first is an increase in
the amount of food produced in the country itself. If the parks and
gardens of the gentry were ploughed up or turned into allotments, a few
hundred thousands would be added to the population of the United
Kingdom, at the cost of one of the few remaining beauties which make our
country attractive to the eye. The introduction of the potato into
Ireland added several millions of squalid inhabitants to that
ill-conditioned island, and when the crop failed, large numbers of them
inflicted themselves on the United States, to the detriment of that
country. The richest countries to-day are those which produce more food
than they require, such as the United States, Canada, Australia,
Roumania, and the Argentine. (We need hardly say that throughou