powers of the soil and lessen the productive powers of past and present labour. That this will ere long be seen to be the truth arising out of the discoveries of the great English professor we cannot for a moment doubt. [Illustration] CHAPTER V. OF THE CHECKS TO POPULATION IN FRANCE. In the sixth chapter of Book II., Mr. Malthus gives us some account of the checks to population which existed in France at the end of last century, which might convince the most sceptical of modern pessimists of the vast strides which a nation may take in a short period towards the attainment of comfort and well-being. The population of France, before the beginning of the war, says Malthus, was estimated by the Constituent Assembly at 26¼ millions. Necker estimated the yearly births, in 1780, to be above a million, and it is curious, as we shall soon see, that France, in 1874, had not a million of births with a population of 36 millions. Malthus estimated that, out of that million, 600,000 would attain the age of 18; and, considering that nearly as many persons are to be found in a given society, unmarried as married, he amply accounts for the seeming paradox that, whilst France was supposed to have lost 2½ millions by actual war and its consequences, at the time of the Revolution, the population was found to have increased, in 1800, as compared with 1790. “At all times,” says Malthus, “the number of small farmers and proprietors in France was great: and though such a state of things is by no means favourable to the clear surplus produce or disposable wealth of a nation, yet sometimes it is not unfavourable to the absolute produce, and it has always a tendency to encourage population.” This last remark of Mr. Malthus has not been verified. In no country does the population tend to increase so slowly as in modern France—the land _par excellence_ of peasant proprietors. In all probability, the rapid increase of population at the time of the French Revolution arose from the lower death-rate which always follows a sudden amelioration of the position of the humbler classes, such as that which took place where landed property came into their possession. The average proportion of births to population in all France, before the Revolution was, according to Necker, 39 per 1000. It has singularly altered since that time, and is now only 26 per 1,000, or the lowest birth-rate in Europe. The death-rate then was 33 per 1,000, and has fallen of late to 21 per 1,000, or nearly the lowest death-rate in Europe.