answered too often, that the second (the war expenditure) was good for trade. They were safer in urging that for the first part of the century the long peace (1727–40) and the good harvests (1731–50) made the presumption of increase very strong.[375] Price made much of the emigrations to America and to the East and West Indies. It was answered that the known possibility of emigration would give men at home the greater courage to have a family. Even the engrossing and consolidation of farms and the enclosure of commons, which he considered to be against population, would, said his opponents, increase the food, and therefore the people, though perhaps not the people on the spot;[376] and the increase of paupers was thought to be a sign of overflowing numbers. He saw a cause of depopulation in the increased luxury and extravagance of the people of England. At the beginning of the century gin-drinking was credited with an evil effect on population.[377] When the opponents of Price did not meet this with Mandeville’s sophism, luxury benefits trade, they answered that what had become greater was not the national vices but the national standard of comfort, the expansion of which implied an increase of general wealth and presumably of population.[378] Beyond doubt too (it was argued) the general health was better, and medical science had won some triumphs.[379] Malthus, however, warns us against this argument; great unhealthiness is no proof of a small population nor healthiness of a large.[380] In the ten years after the American War of Independence (1783–93) the prosperity of the country seems to have advanced by leaps and bounds, only to make the subsequent depression the more observable. Dr. Price, who did not live to see the relapse, seems to have confessed his error. “In allusion to a diminishing population, on which subject it appears that he has so widely erred, he says very candidly that perhaps he may have been insensibly influenced to maintain an opinion once advanced.”[381] Yet public opinion was not fully convinced till 1801, when “the answers to the Population Act at length happily rescued the question of the population of this country from the obscurity in which it had been so long involved.”[382]