g, the food must be necessarily sufficient to
support, and to continue, the race of labourers.

Other circumstances being the same, it may be affirmed that countries
are populous according to the quantity of human food which they
produce, and happy according to the liberality with which that food is
divided, or the quantity which a day's labour will purchase. Corn
countries are more populous than pasture countries, and rice countries
more populous than corn countries. The lands in England are not suited
to rice, but they would all bear potatoes; and Dr Adam Smith observes
that if potatoes were to become the favourite vegetable food of the
common people, and if the same quantity of land was employed in their
culture as is now employed in the culture of corn, the country would be
able to support a much greater population, and would consequently in a
very short time have it.

The happiness of a country does not depend, absolutely, upon its
poverty or its riches, upon its youth or its age, upon its being thinly
or fully inhabited, but upon the rapidity with which it is increasing,
upon the degree in which the yearly increase of food approaches to the
yearly increase of an unrestricted population. This approximation is
always the nearest in new colonies, where the knowledge and industry of
an old state operate on the fertile unappropriated land of a new one.
In other cases, the youth or the age of a state is not in this respect
of very great importance. It is probable that the food of Great Britain
is divided in as great plenty to the inhabitants, at the present
period, as it was two thousand, three thousand, or four thousand years
ago. And there is reason to believe that the poor and thinly inhabited
tracts of the Scotch Highlands are as much distressed by an overcharged
population as the rich and populous province of Flanders.

Were a country never to be overrun by a people more advanced in arts,
but left to its own natural progress in civilization; from the time
that its produce might be considered as an unit, to the time that it
might be considered as a million, during the lapse of many hundred
years, there would not be a single period when the mass of the people
could be said to be free from distress, either directly or indirectly,
for want of food. In every state in Europe, since we have first had
accounts of it, millions and millions of human existences have been
repressed from this simple cause; though perhaps in s