Items related to Population and Capital, a Course of Lectures
Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1854. Excerpt: ... I LECTURE X. ON POPULATION. In my last lecture I dilated on the severe and constant drains, arising from want, hardships, disease, and, above all, from war, to which population is subject in the early stages of society. I endeavoured to show that any less degree of fecundity than that with which Nature has actually endued the species would scarcely suffice to countervail that perennial waste of life which results from the habits and propensities of the savage state. So far as regards this primitive stage of society, I may probably assume that the law of population requires no further vindication. Few will venture to specify the prolificness of the species as the cause of the sufferings endured by the improvident, sensual, and ferocious savage; or to assert that the dangers with which his existence is beset are superfluously guarded against by the force of the reproductive principle. But it is in regard to a more advanced condition of society, that the principle of population has been chiefly called in question. When wars have become less frequent and less destructive, when the visitations of famine have grown comparatively rare, when plagues and epidemics have been checked by the advance of medical and sanitary skill, and when the average term of human life has been consequently prolonged,--then it is that the adaptation of the law of human increase to the altered state of society is thought questionable; for while, on the one hand, the physical power of propagation remains unabated, on the other hand, the consumption of life is vastly diminished. How, it is asked, shall the pressure of numbers against food, which, while man is in a state of nature, so many potent checks exist to counteract, be obviated at a period when nearly all the leading causes of mo...
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