in the last two hundred years, through the greater healthiness of the conditions of life; and it is not at all surprising that a population should be kept up or even made to increase with a smaller proportion of births, deaths, and marriages than before.[328] The French labouring classes at the beginning of the Revolution were seventy-six per cent. worse fed, clothed, and supported than their fellows in England.[329] Their wages were 10_d._ a day (as compared with 1_s._ 5_d._), while the price of corn was about the same; but their condition and their remuneration had been decidedly improved by the Revolution and the division of the national domains. Wages in money (since Young wrote) had risen to 1_s._ 3_d._ a day; and, according to some authorities, the real wages had become even higher than in England.[330] The new distribution of wealth had been followed by an immense increase in the production of it, shared by the producers themselves, and making France immensely stronger as a nation either for offence or defence.[331] Such an improvement in the condition of the people would naturally be followed by diminution in the deaths; and a diminution in the deaths must lead either to an increase of population or to a decrease in the marriages and births. The latter (which is presumably an increase of moral restraint) has followed. In the ten years after the Peace of Amiens the population seems to have increased only at a very slow rate. “There is perhaps no proposition more incontrovertible than this, that in two countries, in which the rate of increase, the natural healthiness of climate, and the state of towns and manufactures are supposed to be nearly the same, the one in which the pressure of poverty is the greatest will have the greatest proportion of births, deaths, and marriages,” and _vice versâ_.[332] Malthus’ survey of population in France applies only to his own lifetime, and indeed only to the earlier part of that. To do him full justice we must place his picture of the real losses of war alongside of his description of the compensations. The constant tendency of population to increase up to the limits of the food may be interpreted (in the case of war) as the tendency of the births in a country to supply the vacancies made by death. The breaches are not permanent; they are among the reparable as distinguished from the irreparable mischiefs of war. But this does not, from a moral or political aspect, afford the slightest excuse for the misery caused thereby to the existing inhabitants. “Can you by filling cradles empty graves?”