Part 12

According to Mr Rickman, from the best information that can be obtained from Doomsday Book, the population of England in the time of William the Conqueror was 1½ millions.

In the reign of Edward the Third (1377), when a poll-tax was imposed on all persons of both sexes above fourteen, it was 2½ millions.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, at the period of the Spanish Armada, it was 4 millions.

According to Mr Finlaison, at the close of the 16th century it was somewhat under 5 millions two hundred thousand.

According to Mr Rickman, on a computation founded on the return of Baptisms, as stated in the Abstract of Parish Registers, it was in 1700, 5½ millions; in 1750, 6½ millions; and in 1770, 7½ millions.

The first actual enumeration was made in 1801. The following table exhibits the rate of increase in the population of Great Britain from that time up to the enumeration in 1851:

┌──────┬────────────┬──────────┬──────────┐ │ │ │ INCREASE │ ANNUAL │ │YEARS.│POPULATION. │ Each │ RATE │ │ │ │Decennial │ of │ │ │ │ Period. │ Increase │ │ │ │ │per cent. │ ├──────┼────────────┼──────────┼──────────┤ │ 1801 │ 10,917,433 │ │ │ │ 1811 │ 12,424,120 │1,506,687 │ 1.274 │ │ 1821 │ 14,402,643 │1,978,523 │ 1.489 │ │ 1831 │ 16,564,138 │2,161,495 │ 1.408 │ │ 1841 │ 18,813,786 │2,249,648 │ 1.279 │ │ 1851 │ 21,121,967 │2,308,181 │ 1.186 │ └──────┴────────────┴──────────┴──────────┘

This increased production of food consists chiefly of grain, green crops, and garden vegetables, countless in variety, and highly nutritious and grateful, completely reversing the nature of the national subsistence compared with that of former times, and giving to the masses of the people a constant and unfailing supply, winter and summer, of fresh vegetable nutriment.

This increased production of food is mainly of home growth, for the supply of wheat from foreign sources would scarcely suffice to afford to each person two gallons of flour annually.

This increased production has been obtained partly by a progressive increase in the quantity of land brought under cultivation, which now amounts for the United Kingdom to upwards of 40,000,000 of acres, by far the greater part of which is employed in the production of human food; and partly by the employment of capital in the improvement of the soil, by which large tracts that a few years ago were wholly sterile, or deemed incapable of producing wheat, now yield some of the finest grain in England.

Footnote 17:

“In 1821 almost the only grain produced in the Fens of Cambridgeshire consisted of oats; since then, by draining and manuring, the capability of the soil has been so changed that these fens now produce some of the finest wheat that is grown in England; and this more costly grain now constitutes the main dependence of the farmers in a district where 14 years ago its produce was scarcely attempted.”—Porter’s Progress of the Nation.

This increased fertility of the soil renders it more healthy by diminishing its moisture and raising its temperature. One cubic foot of water in the process of evaporation deprives three millions of cubic feet of air of one degree of temperature. An undrained field growing rushes has a permanent temperature from four to six degrees lower than an adjoining field drained and growing wheat. By draining and manuring, by throwing down fences, by removing trees, by clearing underwood, and by promoting the free aëration of the soil, the temperature of large tracts of land in the north of England has been permanently raised three degrees. Thus that very culture of the earth, by which it is made to yield the largest amount of food, increases its salubrity as an abode for man, and lessens at their source the main causes of epidemics.

This increased production has been obtained by a proportionally small addition to labour; for while the quantity of land brought under cultivation, and its produce, have been increasing at a rate of which there is no similar example in any age or country, the relative number of persons employed in agriculture has been as steadily decreasing. As long as the labour of a man applied to the cultivation of the soil is capable of producing only a bare subsistence for himself, there can be no advance in civilization. But when two men can produce subsistence for three, the labour of the third can be set free for the production of surplus articles, which add to the sum of the general convenience, and from that moment the community takes a start in the career of improvement. From a comparison of occupations taken in 1831, it appears that, at that time, the division of labour among the people was such that one person raised nearly all the food of home production consumed by four persons.

Footnote 18:

Porter’s Progress of the Nation, Chap. III.

Were the remaining three idle? Mediately or immediately they were engaged in producing clothing, or fuel, or machinery, economizing the production of both; and busily and well they worked.

In number they exceed one million and a half. Taking into account the accessory occupations, indeed, no fewer than one million two hundred thousand are employed on one single material alone, namely cotton. For these workers, at the beginning of the century, there were imported yearly 56 millions of pounds of cotton: at present the annual importation of it exceeds 550 millions of pounds. These workers in 1820 were assisted in their operations by fourteen thousand power-looms; at present they are assisted by three hundred thousand power-looms, besides twenty-five millions of spindles; while each power-loom, superintended by an adult assisted by a child, completes weekly twenty times the amount of work which the hand-loom is capable of producing. The increase of production is of course enormous, and the effect is a progressive cheapening of the articles manufactured, reducing the price of some of them tenfold, and placing them within the reach of the poorest classes: articles of clothing not only conducive to health through warmth, but almost equally so through cleanliness; for they are almost all composed of such tissues and textures as favour and compel frequent washing.

Footnote 19:

Return to the House of Commons by the Factory Inspectors, of the Number of Cotton, Woollen, Worsted, Flax, and Silk Factories subject to the Factories Acts in the United Kingdom, page 21.

Footnote 20:

The cheapness of some of these ornamental as well as useful fabrics is calculated to excite astonishment. A yard of platt net is worth from 20s. to £5; a yard of plain net may be bought for one shilling.

Gigantic strides have been made at the same time in another article of clothing, the basis of which is wool, and of which there were imported in 1801 seven millions of pounds; in 1844, sixty-three millions of pounds. This enormous importation of foreign wool has not only not diminished its home growth, but the increased demand for it has led to a vast multiplication of the animals that yield it, and what is of equal importance, has induced an extraordinary care in improving their breed; so that the very means which have fed the steam-engine have fed the people both with more plentiful and with better food; the steam-engine, meanwhile, applied to these and to all manufacturing processes, being as much a producer of food as the plough.

Footnote 21:

Similar progress has been made in the manufacture of flax and silk as of cotton and wool.

And the same is emphatically true of fuel, the main creator of all this activity and of its astonishing results; this necessary of life being now brought to the door of every family in three-fold abundance and at one-half the price at which it could have been obtained at the commencement of the century; while such is the demand for it in various manufactures of vast magnitude, that one trade alone, that of iron, consumes annually eight millions of tons—a trade which immediately and powerfully facilitates the production both of food and of clothing. Thus, like one of Nature’s beautiful adaptations, like that wonderful cycle, for example, in which production, change, and reproduction go on in an unvarying circle, the constant and abundant supply of one main necessary of life furnishes the means of producing the others; while these last are the immediate causes of the abundance of the first.

And what a busy hive does this country present at the present time! Out of every thousand males twenty years of age in the kingdom, 836 are directly employed in some active occupation contributing to the national wealth; while the remaining 114 are by no means idle, for they are engaged in some one of the professions.

Though the masses have not yet obtained their due share of the wealth they create, and though there is a class which in relation to one essential condition, to be stated immediately, civilization has scarcely reached, or reached only to injure—with these exceptions, no doubt very important ones—the evidence is indubitable that the entire body of society, from its base to its apex, stands on an elevated table-land which many centuries have been employed in raising and consolidating. I have partly proved this by showing the general diffusion of the means of healthful subsistence and the prolongation of life. I am now to prove it by applying these facts to the subject more especially before us, the decline and disappearance of epidemics.