In the great towns of Central Europe a man has perhaps some excuse for trusting to the chapter of accidents; in the great variety of occupations he may have some excuse for thinking there will surely be a vacancy for him, and he may “e’en take Peggie.” Norway, however, is to manufacturing countries what the country districts elsewhere are to the towns elsewhere. In the country districts an excess of population cannot be hidden, and the superfluities must go to the towns. Those who marry, therefore, when there is no vacancy for them, do so with the alternatives of poverty or migration clearly before their eyes. In Norway every peasant, not to say every farmer, knows quite certainly whether there is an opening for him or not, and, if there is not, he cannot marry.[249] The conditions of the problem were in this way simplified, and the problem itself was satisfactorily answered. The only districts where Malthus saw signs of poverty were on the coast, where the people live by fishing; the openings for a fisherman are not so distinctly limited in their numbers as the openings for a farmer. Time has united Norway and Sweden under one king (1814), and Sweden now presents no unfavourable contrast with Norway. Even in 1825 Malthus wrote[250] that the progress of agriculture and industry, and the practice of vaccination, had caused a steady and healthful increase of population since 1805. He would be pleased to find too by the census that the population of Norway had increased very greatly in proportion to its poor. The improvement continues. The paupers were about one per cent. of the population in 1869 (when they were nearly five per cent. in England), which seems to have meant a decrease from previous years;[251] but between 1865 and 1875 the population had increased fourteen per cent. in spite of considerable emigration.[252] Malthus would have recognized with satisfaction that the nation had been “either increasing the quantity or facilitating the distribution” of its food,[253] that is to say, improving either its agriculture or its manufactures. It has really done both. Though the growth of the population has been greater in the centres of manufacture, there has been progress also in the country districts. Many of the old customs and laws that hampered agriculture have ceased to exist.[254] Malthus himself says that, if Government would remove hindrances to agriculture, and spread sound knowledge about it, it would do more for the population of the country than by establishing five hundred foundling hospitals.[255] He need not have confined his recommendation to agriculture; and elsewhere he states the truth in broader terms: “The true encouragement to marriage is the high price of labour, and an increase of employments which require to be supplied with proper hands.”[256] Remove hindrances to trade and spread sound knowledge of it—that (in his view) is the way to increase the