vast quantities, they cannot, from the nature of things, go entirely to the rich; the rich can easily eat and drink beyond the normal value, but not much (without Gargantua’s mouth) beyond the normal quantity; and, at least in the case of our own country, very little is exported again. Generally speaking, it is a true saying that, the more the food, the more are fed. But what is true of necessaries in England is true even of other goods in France.[344] The “average wealth of each person” is not there, as often elsewhere, a mere arithmetical entity, but a very near approach to the ordinary state of the great majority of the people; and this average wealth is thought by good authorities[345] to have more than doubled since the beginning of the century. The population, on the other hand, has only increased by one-half; and the average duration of life has lengthened from twenty-eight to thirty-seven years. In a paper of Chateauneuf’s (1826) quoted by MacCulloch,[346] it was said that the French people were improving their condition by diminishing their marriages. The statistician Levasseur, on the contrary, with the facts of another half-century before him, tells us that married people in France are the _majority_ of the population,[347] the average age of marriage being twenty-six for the women, and rather more than thirty for the men. The birth-rate, however, is the lowest in Europe,[348] being 1 in 37, as opposed to 1 in 27 for England. It is by refusing to fill the cradles that they leave the graves empty. Yet France is less healthy than England. Its death-rate in 1882 was 22.2 per thousand, while in England it was 19.6.[349] There are other features which make the case unique. There are few foreigners in France; the numbers of the French people are neither swelled by immigration nor reduced by emigration. Since the expulsion of the Huguenots and the colonization of Canada, few nations have been so rooted in their own country; even Algerian and Tunisian conquests are due to no popular passion for colonizing. The peasant properties have made the people averse to movement. At present most Frenchmen remain during life in the same Department in which they were born;[350] and recent observers tell us[351] that a military career is becoming distasteful to all classes. Taking the absence of immigration as balanced by the absence of emigration, we are brought to the conclusion that the population of France is stationary by its own deliberate act.