Vital statistics : a memorial volume of selections from the reports and writings of William Farr / edited for the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain by Noel A. Humphreys.
- William Farr
- Date:
- 1885
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Vital statistics : a memorial volume of selections from the reports and writings of William Farr / edited for the Sanitary Institute of Great Britain by Noel A. Humphreys. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service. The original may be consulted at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine Library & Archives Service.
61/600 (page 29)
![about 27,724,849 in 1851; but, in the interval, 2,685,747 persons emigrated, who, if simply added to the population of the United Kingdom, make the survivors and descendants of tlic races, within the British Isles in 1821, now 30,410,595. 6. Finally, the numbers of the population are increased by an abun- dance of the necessaries of life ; and reduced by famines, epidemics, and public calamities, affecdug the food, industry, and life of the nation. The pestilences of the middle ages—the famine, the influenza, and the cholera of modern times—ai'e examples of one class of these agencies ; the security, and freedom which England has latterly enjoyed, are examples of the beneficent effect of another class of influences, not only on the happiness of the people, but also on the numbers which the country can sustain at home, and can send abroad to cultivate, possess, and inherit other lands. All these causes affecting the increase of the population of G-reat Britain, and the precise extent to which each operates, will ultimately be known by means of a continuous series of such observations as have been commenced at this census.—(Census Report, 1851 ; Enumeration, Vol. I., pp. xxxi-ii.) Increase and Decrease of Population.—The natural increase of popu- lation, instead of proceeding at the actual rate of about 1 3, would, it is said, be in the end 1 ■ 8 per cent, annually; it would go on indefinitely, and would double the population every 39 years ; at the natural rate actually prevailing, upon this hypothesis the population will double itself in 55 years. This question has, therefore, to be discussed. Mr. Malthus calculated that the unrestrained principle of population would fill not only the earth with men, but people all the planets of all the suns that shine in the visible universe.* And latterly the President of the Health Officers of London, finding that the proportion of children that die under five years of age is more than 40 per cent, of the total deaths in England and Wales, remarks if— If this were not so, the increase of population would be prodigious; for it is the means whereby the annual excess of births over deaths is kept down to the reasonable proportion of 12' 8 per 1,000 of the population. If it reached to 18 per 1,000 * * the population would be doubled in rather less than 40 years. Consider for a moment the consequences of this. * * In 40 years the population of England and Wales would be over 45,000,000 * * in 120 years * * it Avould be near 182,000,000. * * This sort of thing could never last; for in about 240 years the population of England and Wales, unless it was exported in huge masses, would reach to rather more than 1,550 millions, and it would be as thickly placed over the whole country as it is in London at the present moment. At the rate here called reasonable, the population by the hypothesis would double itself every 541 years, so that the time in which the dreaded •■ Malthus had the following passage in one edition of his Political Eeonomy : If any person will take the trouble to make the calculation, he will see that if the necessaries of life could be obtained without limit, and the number of people could be doubled every 25 years, the population which might have been produced from a smgle pair smce the Christian era would have been sufficient, not only to fill the earth quite full of people, so that four should stand upon every square yard, but to fill all the planets of our solar system in the same way, and not only them, but all the planets revolving round the stars which are visible to the naked eye, supposinn- each of them to be a sun, and to have as many planets belonging to it as our sun has. [Quotation from Malthus' Principles of Political Economy, p. 227 in Godwin on Population, p. 484. I do not find the passage in the second edition of the Principles ]. t On the Estimation of Sanitary Condition. By H. Letheby, M.B, pp 20-21 (Hi'](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21364333_0061.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
