Theories of population from Raleigh to Arthur Young : lectures delivered in the Galtonian laboratory, University of London, under the Newmarch foundation, February 11 to March 18, 1929, with two additional lectures and with references to authorities, / by James Bonar.
- James Bonar
- Date:
- 1931
Licence: In copyright
Credit: Theories of population from Raleigh to Arthur Young : lectures delivered in the Galtonian laboratory, University of London, under the Newmarch foundation, February 11 to March 18, 1929, with two additional lectures and with references to authorities, / by James Bonar. Source: Wellcome Collection.
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![number of labourers on his land than by the number of footmen behind his chair. He was a born reporter, and the Morning Post engaged him to report the debates for them.5 He says that, in his time, as things were in England, he could do no greater public service than stir men up to improve cultiva¬ tion and thereby increase the supply of food, and to this faith at least he was constant through life. On the death of the Earl of Orford (1772) he wrote in his praise: “I leave the lieutenancy of a county, the rangership of a park, and the honours of the Bedchamber to those in whose eyes such baubles are respectable. I would rather dwell on the merit of the first importer of Southdown sheep into Norfolk.55 He criticized the King’s bull and the King’s hogs, but his relations with Farmer George were excellent. He prided himself on being an experimentalist and having no general principles. As late as 1793 he writes: “I have been too long a farmer to be governed by anything but events.5’6 “I have a constitutional abhorrence of theory.” This would be pragmatism run wild, but he either does not really mean it, or he conveniently forgets it. We have appeals to principles and even to political economy. “I have through these papers laid it down as a principle that population is proportioned to employment”; and in the first of his books he writes: “Agriculture is the first and most impor¬ tant of all business [es] and the foundation which supports manufactures.”](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b29931782_0228.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
