In this connection it was impossible for him to avoid the question that had long agitated the minds of politicians. Had the numbers of the English people been decreasing or increasing since the Revolution of 1688, and especially in the course of the eighteenth century? Economists of the present day are overloaded with statistics; but, when Adam Smith wrote the _Wealth of Nations_, he was unaware of the numbers of his own nation. To estimate population without a census is to study language without a dictionary; there had been no census since the coming of the Armada,[357] and it was not till one hundred years after that event that statistical studies came much into favour. An annual enumeration of the people was proposed in the House of Commons in 1753, as a means of knowing the numbers of our poor.[358] But the proposal was resisted as anti-Scriptural and un-English, exposing our weakness to the foreigner and spending public money to settle the wagers of the learned. There was probably a fear[359] that the tax-gatherer would follow on the heels of the enumerator, as he had done in France. The House of Lords beat off the bill, and left England in darkness about the numbers of its people for another half-century, though something like a census of Scotland was made for Government in 1755.[360] As without the Irish Famine we might not have had the total Repeal of the Corn Laws, so without the worst of all possible harvests in 1799 we might have had no census in 1801, for Parliament, when they passed Mr. Abbot’s Enumeration Bill in 1800, looked to an enumeration of the people to guide them in opening and closing the ports to foreign grain. The practical question about the increase or decline of English numbers was connected, in logic as well as in time, with the controversy about the comparative populousness of ancient and modern nations. The same year (1753) which saw the attempt to settle by census the question of England’s depopulation, saw also the publication of Dr. Robert Wallace’s reply to Hume’s _Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations_, in his _Dissertations on the Numbers of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times_. One of Henry Fox’s objections to Hardwicke’s Marriage Act (of 1753) was that it would check population.[361] We are told[362] that the academical discussion roused attention on the Continent, and a French savant, Deslandes, published an estimate of the numbers of modern nations, in which England was made much inferior to France, having only eight millions against twenty. This was too much for English patriotism. Even in our own day a great war and a few reverses usually fill England for a year or two with forebodings of decay. Written in 1757 (at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War), Dr. John Brown’s _Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times_ was only the most popular of a host of gloomy pamphlets too prejudiced to be of much use for statistics.[363] Dr. Adam Anderson[364] sides with