principles and guiding light of intellectual philanthropy. It is daily becoming more barbaric and inferior to do otherwise. It is as great a disgrace to be found selfish and tricking in public life, as to be knavish and fraudulent in our private dealings. It is a brand and a stigma not to legislate and counsel uprightly. Some may choose to act otherwise still, from old habits and imperfect education, and also because human conduct will long have its obliquities and inconsistencies. There is also a good deal of that minor unsoundness of mind which, although not amounting to positive derangement, yet produces much erroneous thought and action; but the general stream will be purer and healthier, and is already much clearer than it has been. Knowledge and education, irresistible improvements, the contagion which spreads imperceptibly from them, and the example of every improving individual, are daily meliorating the minds of all classes in society. If we feel this benefit in ourselves, it is a witness and a sample how others are affected. The consequence, therefore, will henceforward be, that whatever new provisions, and inventions, and regulations the national good requires, as further generations and fresh circumstances arise, there will always be the desire and the abilities to supply them. Difficulties will occur only to rouse the determination and to suggest the means of surmounting them. It is thus that intelligence always acts, and thus averts or extinguishes the evils that would embarrass.

For these reasons, with a fair exertion of the talent now existing in our rulers and lawgivers, and of their habitual good meaning and social well-wishing, we need not regard our increasing population with the least anxiety or mistrust. Political wisdom will do what is necessary to harmonize its numbers with the general good; and the Divine blessing, poured with approbation on such aims and conduct, will give effect and success to what national philanthropy will thus devise and establish.

Let us, then, not dread enlarging numbers, nor pursue measures of severity against those who most need our attention and kindness, in order to repress them; but let us seek, instead, the most judicious means of adapting the increase, which it is the Divine plan and purpose at present to occasion, to the social benefit of all, with the least possible pain and injury to any class of our community.

Let us now inquire into the benefits which an increasing

population occasions; and then consider if any disadvantages arise from it to overbalance them. But we will not do this on the mistaken principle of sceking only the greatest happiness of the greatest number; because this seems to me to be an evil principle in its pratical applications, as it involves the perpetual sacrifice of the minority to the majority. Forty-nine may be made miserable that fifty-one may be happier! the greater number may enjoy and tyrannize! the rest must, at their pleasure and for their convenience, submit and suffer! Instead of this, we will be guided by the Christian tenets of doing good to all, and of doing to every one what we desire should be done to ourselves.

All national greatness is founded upon population and arises from it. There can no more be national greatness without population-a population adequate to the magnitude-than there can be human nature without human beings. It is the people which constitute every state, not the soil they tread on. They form the country, which takes its station in the charts of history; and nations arise to be such only as their populations enlarge. It is this increase which converts a family into a tribe, and a tribe into a people, and a people into a powerful, civilized, and distinguished nation. Stop the multiplication anywhere, and it dwindles into inferiority and feebleness in every age and climate. The first marking symptom of a thriving country is the increase of its popula

tion.

It was not Africa which made Carthage what it was, but the Tyrian emigrants, who, by their settlement and multiplication, formed and established, as they increased, the Carthaginian empire on the African shore. When the Roman hostilities broke up the Punic population, the Carthaginian state and nation disappeared, though their territory remains where it was, and the walls and edifices were long subsisting upon ít, and new comers afterward stationed themselves within them. It was by the continual enlargement of its various populations that Greece arose, with its multiplications, to splendour and fame within itself, and enriched and dignified its immortal nation by numerous settlements and colonizations elsewhere.*

It is an interesting fact, that, in our own days, an evidence should occur of the Athenian colonization of the Adriatic. Greek vases have been found in Adria, and led to a discussion how they came there, and

From this cause all the great empires of antiquity, and the prosperous kingdoms of modern days, have ascended to their wealth and celebrity. The multiplications of their populations have always been the basis of their progressive eminence, and always will be the indispensable materials of their stability, their affluence, their interior strength, and their external power. The Roman empire fell for ever when its population was shattered and consumed. Its hills, and Tiber, and city remain, but the ancient greatness and the ancient Romans have vanished together, to reappear no more. A nation once exterminated can never be remade.

The elements of all political advantages and grandeur to a country lie in its population, and nowhere else. The richest soil, the gold and diamond mines, the finest quarries and noblest rivers of any region, are nothing to society without the hands and arms that extract and apply their utilities from the passive ground which contains and conceals them. It is multitude which makes a people, and their local station becomes important and dignified in proportion to their increase, and to those activities which their augmentation excites and makes necessary. Wealth, industry, produce, arts, comfort, convenience, influence, talent, and power augment as they multiply and decline as they diminish. There is not a single state or nation which has arisen to notice or fallen from it but illustrates these conclusions. It is, therefore, to act in contradiction to recorded history and to living experience to assert that enlarging populations are not a national benefit, and have not been the solid means by which national aggrandizement and dominion have been most effectually established and upheld.

From this general reasoning let us pass into more particular observations.

Population cannot increase, unless there be subsistence to maintain it, and never arises where there is no provision for it. The food was made at the creation, before the living beings were formed who were to use it; and in every period

what connexion could have been between that region and Adria. No information in ancient authors elucidated the question: but in this last summer, 1836, Mr. L. Ross, who is making excavations at Athens, in prosecution of his archæological researches, dug up an inscription, which states that a colony from Athens, under a leader named Miltrades, settled in Adria 325 years before the Christian era. He has lately published an account in the "Kunstblatt of Stutgard" of this discovery.

since the same order in the course of nature has ensued. Provision everywhere precedes the gift of life. No animals of any kind arise where there is no food; but all which come into being find their maintenance at hand. This plan is so remarkably and invariably pursued in all the systems of nature, that every animal mother which does not herself feed her young, is always led to lay her eggs where the emerging offspring will find what they require. I believe I have mentioned some instances of this sort in the first volume of these letters.

In the human race, the parents would not be alive to have their children unless they had sufficient sustenance to keep themselves in being. Therefore, the existence of those who live, and the fact of females being mothers, are at all times evidence that there is on the earth, or regularly arising from it, enough to maintain every coexisting race. There could not be either parents or offspring unless this were the case. Population thus follows subsistence, and never comes where this is not. Hence the very appearance of population is a testimony that the food which supports them is at that time in existence also.

That food is then in existence is likewise a pledge to us from nature that it will continue to be producible. More food has hitherto always come from the earth as man has applied for it, although he has been increasing from six persons to a thousand millions of human beings. The experience of her past bounty is the only pledge we have from nature for her future supplies for we must remember that she never gives more than an annual sufficiency. She must renew her gift every year, or we all perish. The whole of mankind are, therefore, as much living with the possibility of being starved as any increasing population can be, and perhaps as much as any individual is. We cannot command the sunshine, nor govern the rain, nor avert the frost or hail. We are therefore at the mercy, every year, of him who has this power; and if his constant kindness in this respect releases us from any actual dread of the failure that would ruin us, it is fractious selftormenting to harass ourselves with fear that the additional need of a fiftieth or a hundreth part more will not still be as producible as it hitherto has been. The existence of every population, whatever be its numbers, is therefore a demonstration that it has sufficient food; and the uniform increase

of it, with every enlargement of mankind for the last 4000 years, is the surest pledge we can have that the augmentation of the one will be attended with the same augmentation of the other, which has hitherto never failed to arise. We have as much reason to doubt the coming of the supply at all for any, as to be apprehensive that it will not come with the augmentation we may require. He who grants it has thus far always granted it to our fair industry, in the quantity which has been from time to time wanted, although our claims for the donation have been from age to age enlarging. To suppose that he will not continue to do in this respect what he has, up to this moment, invariably done, is to believe without the smallest evidence, and in opposition to all experience, that he will now suddenly change his system, both of nature and Providence, and doom us to destruction for continuing to fulfil his will in perpetuating the series of his human race. Our conclusion therefore is, that the very rise of population is in itself an evidence of present sufficiency, and that is a token and an assurance of the continuation of the supply.

LETTER XVIII.

Further considerations on the Benefits which arise from an increasing Population.

MY DEAR SYDNEY,

The visible results of an increasing population display to us the benefits we derive from it. We will notice the most prominent of these, as they regard the nation, the age, and the individual, and as they affect human nature itself.

The appointed and sustained division of mankind into many nations makes their comparative populations important objects of their concern with respect to each other. The most numerous are always the most powerful, if other things are equal; and this superiority balances many disadvantages, and puts the less populous in the greater danger of aggression or conquest. Unless, then, other nations are willing or able to curtail their populations, we must grow as they grow, or we shall