The people of an old country, if they cannot or will not emigrate, must, according to Malthus, either look for a high death-rate or accustom themselves to late marriages. M. Muret’s figures showed that many cantons of Switzerland had adopted this last course in the eighteenth century. In the Canton de Vaud, for example, the proportion of marriages to living inhabitants (1 to 140) was lower than in Norway itself. In a pastoral country the limits of human resources are so obvious that the people cannot fail to be impressed with the need of limiting their numbers. Pastoral industry, again, feeds more than it employs,[310] and the unemployed must look for employment elsewhere. This was one reason why there were so many Swiss in foreign service. “When a father has more than one son, those who are not wanted on the farm are powerfully tempted to enrol themselves as soldiers, or emigrate in some other way, as the only chance to enable them to marry.”[311] Malthus was a little disappointed with the condition of the Swiss peasantry when he saw them in 1803. Perhaps, he says, they were still suffering from the wars in which the “Helvetic Republic” had been involved by its French allies; but more probably they were suffering from the unwise attempts of their Government in the previous century to “encourage” what they then thought was a declining population.[312] The peasant who guided Malthus to the sources of the Orbe[313] talked freely to him on the poverty of the district, which he ascribed to early and imprudent marriages, “le vice du pays”; he would have a law passed to prevent a man marrying till he was forty, and a woman till she was elderly. He said that at one time the introduction of stone polishing had given the people high wages and led them to expect constant employment; changes of fashion[314] had helped to drive the industry away, but the habits taught by it had remained so fast rooted in the people that emigration itself brought no relief to their overflowing numbers. But this self-taught Malthusian had not learned his lesson perfectly. He fancied that the fertile lands of the low countries, with their abundance of corn and employments, could never experience the evil of over-population. This was true only in the unhappy sense that they had greater unhealthiness and a greater mortality, providing room for early marriages and many births. It is easy to see that Malthus over-valued his prize. The _pons asinorum_ of the subject is the doctrine that over-population is not a question of absolute numbers or absolute quantity of food and fertility of soil, but of the numbers in relation to the food, in whatever place or time; and the young peasant had not crossed it. CHAPTER VI. FRANCE.