In all his travels he found the foreigner as ignorant as the Englishman on the subject of population. Only twice did he hear the truth expounded to him; in Norway during his first tour, and in Switzerland during his second. In the latter case the enlightenment was confined to one individual; but in the former the whole nation was wise. While the Swedish Government was continually crying for more people, and trying to “encourage population,” the Norwegian Government and people seemed to have understood that the first question must be, “Are there means to feed more people?” If not, then we multiply the nation without increasing the joy. Of course there are cases where we might thin down the nation and still less increase the joy. Mere scantiness of numbers is no advantage to a nation, any more than fewness of wants to an individual; it may mean a low state of civilization, in both cases. It is not by any means so good for a country to be wasted by a pestilence as to be opened up by a new trade. The denser the population, the better;—so says Malthus himself;—but, he adds, let it be a population of strong, comfortable citizens, or let us stand by the small numbers and the slow increase. Look now at Norway.[245] If we were dealing with uncivilized times under the reign of positive checks, we should expect an overflowing population, a large body of poor, and in times of scarcity a great deal of distress. There had been no wars for half a century, the cold climate kept away epidemics, and what else was left but famine to keep down the population to the limits of the food? Vice was not taken into the service, and emigration was seldom practised then in these regions. But Malthus visited the country in one of the hardest years ever known in Europe, 1799, and found the Norwegians “wearing a face of plenty and content, while their neighbours the Swedes appeared to be starving.”[246] He found the death-rate lower in Norway than in any country in Europe.[247] The population, however, was hardly increasing at all; and the proportion of marriages to the whole numbers of the people was smaller than in any country except Switzerland.[248] The positive check was largely superseded by the preventive. The virtue of foresight, he says, is elsewhere forced upon the upper classes by the smallness of their circle and the fewness of openings in business or professions; in Norway it is forced upon all classes alike by the evident smallness of the country’s resources, and by the peculiarities of the national industry. There is almost no variety of occupation or division of labour. The humbler classes are almost all “housemen” (_husmänd_), labourers, who receive from a farmer in quasi-feudal fashion a small house and a little piece of land in return for occasional labour on his fields. In other countries men may easily fall into the fallacy of crediting the whole of the land with a greater power of supporting people than the power possessed by the sum of its parts.