In the third place, there is no doubt, says Malthus, that the division of the domain lands and the creation (or at least the multiplication) of peasant properties have had a great influence both on wealth and on population. They add to population more than to wealth, for they increase the gross produce of food at the expense of the nett surplus. “If all the land of England were divided into farms of £20 a year, we should probably be more populous than we are at present, but as a nation we should be extremely poor. We should be almost without disposable revenue, and should be under a total inability of maintaining the same number of manufactures or collecting the same taxes as at present.”[325] But the division of lands was at least in favour of the gross produce, and even the passing traveller was inclined to think, from the appearance of the fields and the style of the field labour, that, however severely the manufacturing industry of France might have suffered during the war, her agriculture had rather gained than lost.[326] The absence of so many strong men with the armies would not only raise wages at home and make the labourers better off, but by _pro tanto_ lessening the demand for food and taking from those at home the burden of supporting so many men, would not raise the price of food with the wages, but would allow real wages to rise. This would co-operate with political causes in making the people desert the towns for the country, and thereby it would reduce the death-rate, which is always higher in towns than in the country. It is attested by Arthur Young (no friend to the _Essay on Population_) that the high mortality of France before the Revolution (according to Necker 1 in 30) was caused by an over-population which the changes at the Revolution tended to remove. The probability is, therefore, that the births increased and the deaths decreased during the ten years after the Revolution; and there could be no difficulty in understanding the increase of population in spite of the war. In the later editions of the essay[327] Malthus confesses that his French figures need revision; the returns of the Prefects for 1801–2 and other Government papers had given a smaller proportion of births than he had thought probable, for the period before the Revolution. But (he remarks) the Prefects’ returns do not embrace the earlier years of the Revolution, precisely the time when the encouragement to marriage would be greatest and the proportion of births highest. In any case they show that the population of France is not less but greater since the Revolution. If in the latter part of this period the increase was affected by the decrease of deaths rather than by increase of births, they not only leave his position untouched, but give him a result that would highly please him. Certainly in England and in Switzerland, and probably in every European country, the rate of mortality has decreased