At the end of the sixteenth century the population of England and Wales amounted to about five millions, and a hundred years later to about six.  There is no reason to think that under the conditions then existing the country could have supported a larger number.  The birth-rate was kept high by the pestilential state of the towns, and thus the pressure of numbers was less felt than it is now, since it was possible to have, though not to rear, unlimited families.  Occasionally, from accidental circumstances, England was for a short time under-populated, and these were the periods when, according to Professor Thorold Rogers, Archdeacon Cunningham, and other authorities, the labourer was well off.  The most striking example was in the half-century after the Black Death, which carried off nearly half the population.  Wages increased threefold, and the Government tried in vain to protect employers by enforcing pre-plague rates.  Not only were wages high, but food was so abundant that farmers often gave their men a square meal which was not in the contract.  The other period of prosperity for the working man, according to our authorities, was the second quarter of the eighteenth century.  It has not, we think, been noticed that this also followed a temporary set-back in the population.  In 1688 the population of England and Wales was 5,500,520; in 1710 it was more than a quarter of a million less.  The cause of this decline is obscure, but its effects soon showed themselves in easier conditions of life, especially for the poor.  Such periods of under-saturation, which some new countries are still enjoying, are necessarily short.  Population flows in as naturally as water finds its level.

It was not till the accession of George III that the increase in our numbers became rapid.  No one until then would have thought of singling out the Englishman as the embodiment of the good apprentice.  Meteren, in the sixteenth century, found our countrymen ‘as lazy as Spaniards’; most foreigners were struck by our fondness for solid food and strong drink.  The industrial revolution came upon us suddenly; it changed the whole face of the country and the apparent character of the people.  In the far future our descendants may look back upon the period in which we are living as a strange episode which disturbed the natural habits of our race.  The first impetus was given by the plunder of Bengal, which, after the victories of Clive, flowed into the country in a broad stream for about thirty years.  This ill-gotten wealth played the same part in stimulating English industries as the ‘five milliards,’ extorted from France, did for Germany after 1870.  The half-century which followed was marked by a series of inventions, which made England the workshop of the world.  But the basis of our industrial supremacy was, and is, our coal.  Those who are in the habit of comparing the progressiveness of the North-Western European with the stagnation or decadence of the Latin