Never has nature become incompetent to supply the largest number of inhabitants which, during this long lapse of time, have been contemporaries of each other. Never have more human beings been on the earth than that earth, wherever duly cultivated by them, has always supplied-always, for if the harvests fail in one place, they abound in another, as in the present year. America, that usually seeks to pour her exuberances of produce into Europe, is now* drawing from Europe the supply which a temporary deficiency of her last season occasions her to require. So Russia last year, and Ireland occasionally; at times also part of India. Such vicissitudes only promote the intercourse and friendship of mankind with each other, and teach even distant and the most hostile nations the great lesson, which the smallest society feels, and which every individual should remember, that we all need each other's aid and interchanged attentions, and are framed to do so; and that this kind necessity is kept in frequent operation upon us, that we may never forget that we are by nature, and in our relation with our Creator, all brethren-all the children of one universal Father; and that it is his desire and system of our being that we should always feel and act as such whenever we are together. On no other principle could a heaven be a heaven, or any human being become fit to reside in one. On this principle, if it steadily actuated us all, our present earth would, in no long time, be a celestial prelude to that concentration of glory and felicity which will distinguish the promised kingdom that is offered to us now, if we choose to use the explained means of securing it; but which it is left at our present option to avoid and lose, if we prefer to exist elsewhere.

In all our discussions on the laws and effects of population, we should have the principle of the Divine superintendence efficiently in our recollection; because we shall not then be hasty or eager to adopt any theory that is incompatible with it. It is our duty always to desire, and only to value the real truth, whatever that be; but until we have fully explored this invaluable jewel, and with the same exactness with which we pursue our philosophical demonstrations, the principle that both our increase and our subsistence occur under the government, and according to the regulations of a presiding and

conscious Deity, will preserve us from those unmanly fears and gloomy prospects of society on which even our legislators have been solicited to act. Such alarms and excitations are irrational in all who believe in an intelligent Creator; most unjust to him, after the abundant testimonies which he has given to us, in his splendid and beautiful works, and personally to ourselves, in our individual life, of his guardian wisdom and goodness; and not a little dangerous, unfriendly, and prejudicial to those who will always be the majority of all communities, and who, like the great rocks and masses of our globe, are the foundation supports of all that are above them, and the human producers of all the conveniences and gratifications by which every class is gladdened. Most of these were not on our earth till enlarging numbers made the arms that provide them, and gave the stimulus to the human mind to be thus inventive and creative for the general good.

Let us, then, regard the system of our population as a part of the Divine plan, which has its own objects as well as its own laws, and is as much insulated by these from all other living beings as it is from the material substances and moving powers about it. All such things are materials, and assistants, and instruments, and means which human beings are to use for their benefit and actions in their earthly life. But our population is not multiplied for any of the ends and purposes which attach to other objects on our surface. Our mental capacity, notwithstanding its similarities to its inferiors, is, in all its greater powers, universally superior to every other living principle on earth. With this, the laws and system of our population are chiefly connected. All that is bodily to us has been framed to be within our material substance, solely to compose and support a mechanism for our intellectual self to employ and act with. Population should therefore never be considered as a physical question only; it is always a moral, a political, and an intellectual one. Its scheme, laws, purposes, and conduct have always this reference in our Creator's plan. It has been made to resemble animal life in the mode and causes of birth; but from this moment its similitude diminishes, and, in most things, ceases; and all that is different after its birth begins with its first infant cry, and continues to enlarge into essential diversities, except in its system of feeding, respiration, circulation, and such like functions, as long as it exists in its present earthly consciousness. Death

comes at last with its closing assimilation; but even this community of likeness is confined to our material substance. That decomposes into the gases and dustlike particles which constituted its visible figure, as every other animal frame dissolves; but the taught, and trained, and thinking, and feeling soul passes into a state which nothing below itself can experience, because nothing else can be what it was in its intellectual nature when it commenced its human life, nor what it has become by the time when this discontinues. With all the spiritual results of this stage of our being, our population is connected; for in its individualities it comprises them, and will always consist of them, in addition to its original vitality and capacity. It is therefore a small view and a one idea to suppose that it has no laws or objects attached to it but those which concern its animal producibility. Yet, looking for a moment only at these, I am fully satisfied that they have been misconceived and misstated.

The founding error of the theory of Mr. Malthus was, that he made the population of North America, as its numbers were exhibited at various successive periods of increase, the basis of his supposed law of the geometrical multiplication.* It is the fact that the numbers of persons living in the United States, at the successive periods of their enumeration, display, when compared together, an unusual augmentation.† From such appearances, before 1798, Mr. Malthus was led to say, "in the northern states of America the population has been found to double itself, for above a century and a half successively, in less than in each period of 25 years." He did not duly consider that continual streams of emigration had been pouring into this continent at various intervals

*Malthus's Letter to Mr. Godwin, p. 122. I have not this pamphlet, but Mr. Sadler cites it as his authority for saying, "The very existence of the theory is professedly thence deduced."-Sadler, vol. i., p. 397. †The population of America was stated, in 1770, to be 1,500,000. The census, taken at five periods afterward, declared the following series:

1st, in 1790 2d, in 1800 3d, in 1810 4th, in 1820

5th, in 1830

12,858,670

319,576

Gen, View of United States, 53–55.

Malth, Ess. on Pop., vol. i., p. 6.

from its first colonization, and that the increase he remarked had not resulted from the multiplications of its original settlers only. He treated this important contribution to the American population as insignificant,* and thus settled himself in a delusion from which he never emancipated himself. But in searching out the true laws of population, it is obvious that no country should be made the standard to which emigrants were resorting. For unless accurate registers had been kept, discriminating the ancient settlers and their progeny from the various new comers and their descendants, the comparative amount of its whole population at any successive period would not exhibit the effect of the natural increase of the original numbers. No such separation had been made, and therefore it was an illusion at the outset to take the doubling of the numbers in North America, if this were proved, as an indication of the established and universal principle and law of nature for the human increase. But even the American population, taken in its mass, immigrants and all, does not, in its chief separate states, justify the deduced ratio of Mr. Malthus.‡

Mr. Malthus allows only "10,000 per annum for European settlers," which, he says, would be 90,000 in the nine years Mr. Sadler mentions, vol. i., p. 560. How inaccurate this estimate of the supplies from emigration is we may infer from the stated fact, that in the eight years from 1825 to 1832 there went to the United States, from Great Britain and Ireland ONLY, 136,812 persons.-Herts County Press, 12th Oct., 1833. †The facts collected by Mr. Sadler of the series of immigrations to America, which he had found mentioned, are curious and decisive to show that her population was continually enlarging from this cause.See Sadler, vol. i., p. 432-519.

Thus Mr. Malthus states that the population of New England was, in 1643, only 21,200.-Malth., vol. i., p. 559. Mr. Sadler's remarks tend to prove that it was then far more numerous; but taking it at this number, if they had doubled every twenty-five years, they ought, in 1818, to have become 2,713,600. But the census of 1820 shows that even two years later they were only 1,424,090.-1 Sadler, 422. So in the State of RHODE ISLAND: in 1730 the numbers by the census were 17,995. These, on the Malthusian ratio, ought to have been 143,960 in 1805, and 287,920 in 1830; whereas they were only 80,038 in 1820; and no more than 97,199 in the last census of 1830. In like manner Nxw JERSEY. In 1738 the population was, according to Dr. Price, the main authority of Mr. Malthus, 47,369. These, on his ratio, should have become 378,952 in 1813, and above 500,000 in 1830. But in the census of this year they are stated to have been only 320,823, and in 1820, 277,575. So CONNECTICUT, according to Dr. Holmes, had 208,870 persons in 1781. These ought, in 1831, to be 835,480; but in 1830 they were but 297,675. VIRGINIA, in 1671, contained above 40,000 persons; these, in 1830, ought to have been multiplied at least to 14,260,000; but in 1830

We have an instance in our Canadas how much we should mislead ourselves if we took the law of population from its progressive augmentations there, or from other provinces of British America, as Mr. Malthus did from the multiplications in the United States. In the British possessions, the whole numbers of the inhabitants were under 110,000 in the year 1784, but in 1830 they had become 1,054,000.* Here, in less than two 25 years, they had not only twice doubled, but they had received a tenfold multiplication. So that, if we took our view of human increase from this example, we should assert that it proceeded in a tenfold instead of a fourfold proportion. The multiplication was as certain in the one case as in the other; but the error of both would be that of attributing to a natural progression what was principally derived from the adventitious circumstance of successive immigrations.t

they were only 1,211,405.-Ib. Thus, in these five chief and old states, with all their accessions from immigration, the actual results contradict the assumed geometrical hypothesis. I take the earlier dates from the authority quoted by Mr. Sadler, vol. i., p. 404-23, and the census of 1830 from the American publication, "General View of the United States," p. 47-50. Mr. Flint, in his "Mississippi Valley," states the populations, in 1830, in these numbers; Rhode Island, 97,212; New Jersey, 320,779; Connecticut, 297,711; Virginia, 1,211,272; vol. i., p. 232-4. All nearly the same numbers as in the other American authority.

* Mr. Richards, in his report to the Colonial Secretary, thus states these facts:

A tenfold increase in forty-six years.-Richards's Report.

† In Mr. Richards's report he calculated the population of Lower Canada to be 544,000; but the actual census, taken in 1831, ascertained the precise amount to be 591,863, which were thus curiously distinguished :