There is no good reason to believe that at the end of last century the fear of depopulation had given place to a fear of over-population.[383] Malthus and Arthur Young stood almost alone in their opinion.[384] Alarm was felt by the agricultural interest, not lest there should be an excessive population, but lest the population should get its food from abroad. The population it was feared had grown beyond the English supplies of food; but of over-population, in the wider sense of an excess beyond any existing food, the general public and the squires had learned little or nothing in these years; and we have no reason to attribute to Malthus any share in the merit of passing the Enumeration Bill. It was brought forward in an autumn session of Parliament (Nov. 1800) specially convened because of the scarcity. It was moved by Mr. Abbot,[385] who had made his name more as a financier than as an economist, and was chiefly remarkable afterwards as a vigorous opponent of Catholic Emancipation. The motion was seconded by Mr. Wilberforce; and the combination of finance and philanthropy was irresistible. Malthus, though he is the true interpreter of the census, neither caused it in the first instance nor found it of immediate service in spreading his doctrines. The first census would hardly have justified him in treating as obsolete the old quarrel about depopulation; it had decided only the absolute numbers in the first year of the nineteenth century, not the progress or relapse during the eighteenth. Besides giving the actual numbers of the people in 1801, the census no doubt gave “a table of the population of England and Wales throughout the last century calculated from the births.” But the births, though a favourite, were an unsafe criterion; and, for the population at the Revolution of 1688, Malthus would depend more on “the old calculations from the number of houses.”[386] He finds no difficulty of principle in admitting with Mr. Rickman, the editor of the census returns and observations thereon, that the rapid increase of the English people since 1780 was due to the decrease of deaths rather than to the increase of births.[387] Such a phenomenon was not only possible but common, for the rate of births out of relation to the rate of deaths could give no sure means of judging the numbers. After a famine[388] or pestilence, for example, the rate of births might be twice as high as usual, and by the standard of births the numbers of the people would be at their maximum, when a comparison with the rate of deaths or an actual enumeration would show them to be at the minimum,[389] whereas a low rate of births, if lives were prolonged by great healthiness, might certainly mean an increase, perhaps a high increase, of numbers. But at the particular time in question the factory system was coming into being, and manufacturing towns were growing great at the expense of the country districts. The conditions of life in towns