are at the best inferior to those in the country; new openings for trade would add not only to the marriages but to the deaths and the births.[390] The presumption was not all in favour of healthiness; and the registers at that particular time could not tell the whole truth;—the drain of recruits for foreign service would keep down the lists of burials at home, while allowing an increase of births and marriages.[391] For these and other reasons, Malthus, while he agrees with Rickman that the general health has improved, trusts little to his calculations from registers; and concludes that even the census gives us no clear light on the movement of population in the eighteenth century. We can be certain that population increased during the last twenty years of it, and almost certain that the movement was not downwards but upwards since the Peace of Paris; and we have good ground for believing that it was rather upwards than downwards even in the earliest years of the century, during the good harvests and the long peace of Walpole,[392] and that over the whole country the movement of population was less fluctuating in England than on the Continent.[393] The author’s admission, that the proportions of the births, deaths, and marriages were very different in our country in his time from what they used to be,[394] seems to put the census of 1801 out of court altogether in the question of depopulation, especially as there were no previous enumerations with which to compare it. The figures from the parish registers for the whole of the century, that were included in the “returns pursuant to the Population Act,” in addition to the enumeration, turned out on examination to be unsatisfactory.[395]