quantity and facilitate the distribution of the products of agriculture; and, to judge by results, the Norwegian Government has followed it. Sweden,[257] as it then was, furnished a striking contrast to Norway. Malthus had the advantage there of the earliest and most regular of European censuses, beginning with the year 1748, and continued at intervals first of three and then of five years. He found that there was a large mortality, though the conditions of life were superficially the same as in Norway. The only explanation he could see was that the size and shape of the country, as well as its mode of government, did not so forcibly bring home to the people the need of restraint as in Norway, while at the same time the hindrances to good farming were even more serious than in the smaller country. From the very contiguity and general similarity of the two countries, they proved Malthus’ point, by the Method of Difference, almost as well as a deliberate experiment could have done. It was not that Norway had an absolutely small and Sweden an absolutely large population; considerations of absolute greatness or smallness never enter into this, if into any, economical question. But Norway had a moderately large population in proportion to her food, while Sweden had in the same regard an excessive population, a population which was sparely fed even in average years, and decimated by famine and disease in years below the average. Russia,[258] which was the third scene of Malthus’ travels, had this in common with Norway and Sweden, that the movement of its population was unlike that of Central Europe, and that the eccentricity was due to a clearly definable cause. In Norway the shape and climate of the country and the fewness of the available occupations forced the Government and the people to restrain rather than to encourage the increase of numbers; in Sweden, under conditions less simple, the habits of the people conspired with a false policy of the Government to produce an excessive increase. In both cases we have something different from the typical modern society of Central Europe, with its full division of labour, its system of large factories, and its extensive substitution of machinery for hand labour. Russia was as old-fashioned as Norway and Sweden in this respect; and her physical vastness made her a difficult country to know, in these days of slow communication. It is not surprising that the statistics available in the days of Malthus were open to grave suspicion. The death-rate was given as 1 in 60, while in Norway itself it had not been lower than 1 in 48, and it is about 1 in 53 in England now, yet the number of marriages and of births and the size of families were no smaller than elsewhere.[259] These facts by themselves would simply suggest a great rate of increase going on in the country concerned; and Malthus allows that there is great scope for such in Russia. But there was one other fact that strengthened his doubts about