"In each of these periods, however, there was not only much private and public profusion, many expensive and unnecessary wars, great perversion of the annual produce from maintaining productive to maintain unproductive hands; but sometimes, in the confusion of civil discord, such absolute waste and destruction of stock as might be supposed not only to retard, as it certainly did, the natural accumulation of riches, but to have left the country, at the end of the period, poorer than at the beginning.Thus, in the happiest and most fortunate period of them all, that which has passed since the restoration, how many disorders and misfortunes have occurred, which, could they have been foreseen, not only the impoverishment, but the total ruin, of the country would have been expected from them.The fire and the plague of London, the two Dutch wars, the disorders of the Revolution, the war in Ireland, the four expensive French wars of 1688, 1702, 1742, 1750, together with the two rebellions of 1715 and 1745.In the course of the four French wars the nation has contracted more than £145,000,000 of debt, over and above all the other extraordinary annual expense which they occasioned; so that the whole cannot be computed at less than £200,000,000; so great a share of the annual produce of the land and labor of the country has, since the Revolution, been employed upon different occasions in maintaining an extraordinary number of unproductive hands.But had not those wars given this particular direction to so large a capital, the greater part of it would naturally have been employed in maintaining productive hands, whose labor would have replaced with a profit the whole value of.their consumption.The value of the annual produce of the land and labor of the country would have been considerably increased by it every year, and every year's increase would have augmented still more that of the following year.More houses would have been built, more lands would have been improved, and those which had been improved before would have been better cultivated; more manufactures would have been established, and those which had been established before would have been more extended;and to what height the real wealth and revenue of the country might by this time have been raised it is not perhaps very easy even to imagine." (15)These conclusions would indeed all follow did individual and national capital augment on precisely the same principles; but as the progress of the inventive faculty, an essential element in the increase of national wealth, is here left out of the calculation, we have good reason to doubt its accuracy.
Before the time of the Essay on Population, arguments and conclusions very similar to these were brought forward concerning the waste of human life in wars, and the consequent amazing diminution of the greatness and prosperity of nations.Perhaps the fallacy of the one doctrine may be best exposed by stating the other.
"Nations, it was said, can only advance in greatness and prosperity as the numbers of their inhabitants increase.Whatever the natural fertility of the soil, however genial the climate, and however well fitted the whole country may be for the practice of every species of industry, yet, if it be deficient in population, these natural riches can never be elaborated, and it must hold a poor and inconsiderable rank in the scale of nations.
A confined and comparatively barren territory, filled with a numerous, industrious population, exceeds the most fertile and extensive country scantily peopled.It is the people that make the state, its real riches lie in its inhabitants.
"But as population increases, and can only increase, by more coming into the world than go out of it, every man who marries and raises a family is a public benefactor, and the practice of celibacy, so far from being a virtue, is, in reality, a great public crime.The number, however, of those who marry, and have children, in all tolerably quiet and peaceable times, much exceeds that of those who remain single; and, consequently, the number of all the inhabitants of the earth has continually augmented, and, had it not been for the wars which the ambition of princes has stirred up, would have been still much farther augmented.
"The population of England is now much greater than at the Restoration.
It was greater at the Restoration than at the accession of Elizabeth, and then than during the great civil wars.Even then it was greater than at the Conquest, and at that time, than at the invasion of Julius Caesar.
