He spends most pains in illustrating the contrast between the France before the Revolution and the France at the Peace of Amiens. In many ways it was fortunate that he confined himself to the Republican period. It was the time when the moral position of France was highest, and she was warring not for conquest but for defence. Switzerland had exemplified the fact that Emigration does not permanently check population, but, on the whole, encourages it. France, at the time chosen, exemplified the fact that even the most destructive Wars have a similar effect on the growth of numbers. What Malthus had proved more or less deductively in regard to ancient nations he was able to show more inductively by statistics in regard to modern. Great surprise was expressed in the early days of this century that, in spite of her enormous losses, France had not diminished in population. Malthus says she had rather increased than diminished. According to the estimate of the Constituent Assembly, which was confirmed by the calculations of Necker, the population in 1792, before the war, was 26,000,000. In 1801 it seems, from the returns of the Prefects, to have been about 28,000,000.[320] In ten years the increase had been 2,000,000, or 200,000 a year. Yet at a medium calculation France, in addition to the ordinary deaths, had lost by the war about 1,000,000 of men up to that time,[321] or 100,000 a year. How, on the principles of Malthus, were the two facts to be reconciled? To reconcile them he shows, first, how, according to the figures given by Frenchmen themselves, the numbers of the unmarried survivors at home were more than enough to have kept up in case of necessity the old number of marriages and the old rate of increase; second, how from general principles there was a presumption in favour of a rapid increase at such a time; and third, how the social and industrial conditions of the French people since the Revolution were favourable to an increase of population. First, then, he shows that the entire body of unmarried persons was large enough in spite of the war to fill the vacancies and keep up the old rate of increase. The body of the unmarried is formed by the “accumulation” year by year of the numbers of persons, rising to marriageable age, who are not married (or say briefly of the marriageable unmarried, including widows and widowers). This accumulation will only stop when the yearly accessions thereto are no more than equal to the yearly mortality therein. The size of this body will therefore vary with the character of the particular nation considered. In the Canton de Vaud it was equal to the whole number of the married; but in France both the mortality and the marriage rate were higher than in Switzerland, and the unmarried were therefore a smaller fraction of the total numbers. Assuming from the French authorities[322] a certain birth and death-rate, and assuming from the same authorities