have perpetually foiled nature, and it is only within the last century that anything like the annual increase, upon which we are now apt to count, has been attained. In Gibbon's time these same countries could not have mustered much more than half the population of the old empire.1 Even now there is a great difference perceptible between them. The increase of France is very slow, and the Turkish provinces are almost stationary. England has added largely to her population in the last fifty years, and Ireland in the same period has lost one-fourth of her numbers. Neither are these changes always coincident with national advance or decline. France, for instance, though nearly stationary, is still one of the richest countries in Europe, and England has not been impoverished by her increase. The wealth of France appears to attract immigrants from other countries; but notjust now, at least to stimulate the growth of the native French population. What, however, we seem able to say is, that in the long run the lower civilisation has a more vigorous life than the higher, the unprivileged gains upon the privileged caste, and the conquered people absorbs the conqueror. There is no perceptible trace of ancient Greek or Roman blood in Asia Minor or in Turkey in Europe. The Turk- himself a barbarian - has destroyed or driven out or depressed all the higher races he came across, and the population under him is now Syrian or Armenian, Albanian or Bulgarian. The Greece that has been restored represents a very small portion of the country in which Greeks were superior by numbers, or by social influence and commercial activity, under Alexander, or even under Claudius. In Transylvania the Saxons are being crowded out by Roumanians, and in Hungary the Magyars1 and Germans can barely stem the uprising nationalities of Slavs and Roumanians. In Northern Africa the Carthaginian, the Greek, the Roman, and the Vandal were successively effaced, and until the French conquest of Algiers the country was given up to Arabs of a not very pure breed, to Berbers, and to blacks. The Irish were reckoned by Petty in 1672 at 1,100,000 in their own country, and there cannot then have been many outside Ireland. They are now probably from 16,000,000 to 20,000,000, counting only those who can be distinctly recognised as of Irish descent. Before the time of their great dispersion to America and Australia, they had increased within the British Isles from being about a sixth to being nearly a third of 1 Gibbon compares them with the population of all Europe, and puts it at 105,000,000 or 107,000,000. Excluding Germany, Russia, and Poland, Scandinavia, and Ireland, this would be reduced to about 60,000,000. The African provinces would hardly exceed 5,000,000 at that time. Napoleon says that Egypt, when he knew it, had only from 2,500,000 to 2,800,000 souls. - Mémoires de Napoléon, ed. 1823, tome ii. p. 206. 1 As the Magyars are of the same race as the Turks, though with a larger admixture of Aryan blood, it seems desirable I should point out that from first to last I use the words "higher" and "lower" with no reference to the essential value of a race, which it would be hard to determine, but with regard to its actual position in the world. The Słowack may have finer natural capabilities than the Magyar. present, I believe, it is correct to say that the Magyar population has a larger proportion of educated men, and of men owning property, and is more capable of self-government. At 2 Mr. Hallam calls Petty's conjectures "prodigiously vague" (Const. Hist. vol. iii. p. 392, note y); but Swift in 1729 says, that the popular estimate then was 1,500,000 ("Letter on Mr. M'Culla's project about halfpence"). Macaulay seems to follow Petty, and estimates the Catholics at 1,000,000 in 1686, whom Petty had put at 800,000 in 1672 (History, chap. vi.) I have estimated their present numbers at 5,250,000 for Ireland, 1,000,000 for England and Scotland, 800,000 for Australasia, 1,000,000 for the Dominion of Canada, and from 8,000,000 to 10,000,000 for the United States. They are also well represented at the Cape and in South America. the population.1 Compare the increase of Sweden, with a population of the highest type, at once warlike and industrial, during a rather longer period, and it will seem very small indeed. Sweden with its old province Finland has increased at most fourfold; the Irish people at least fifteenfold.2 The Lest it should be supposed that these are speculative calculations, or based upon casual instances, it may be pointed out that under present conditions of society, a class or a people which values comfort and position highly cannot possibly increase as rapidly as the class that contents itself with bare existence. English aristocracy is a typical example of the way in which a close corporation dies out. Its members are almost always wealthy in the first instance, and their estates have been constantly added to by favour from the Crown, by something like the monopoly of the best Government appointments, and by marriages with wealthy heiresses. They are able to command the field sports and open-air life that conduce to health, and the medical advice that combats disease. Nevertheless, they die out so rapidly that only five families out of nearly six hundred go back without a break, and in the male line, to the fifteenth century.1 It is sometimes thought that the untitled landed gentry represent a more permanent aristocracy, better blood, and longer connection with land than the peers. This is only the conceit of county notabilities. The late Mr. Evelyn Shirley made a list of all the families in England who could show unbroken connection with the squirearchy since the Wars of the Roses terminated, and though he was most liberal in his inclusions his list went easily into a single thin volume. It is perfectly true that a certain number of Englishmen with large landed estates descend from ancestors who held land anciently somewhere; but it will generally be found in such cases that the ancestors were yeomen, or at most squireens. An analysis of modern landowners in a county will habitually prove that not more than six or eight, owning 3000 acres, descend from ancestors who owned as much in the time of Elizabeth. The peers, modern as they are, represent a larger average of old families than the country squires. The great device for perpetuating untitled families has been the law of entail, which has really been a most potent engine for destroying them, by forcing successive generations to saddle the land with encumbrances. On the other hand, the fascination of a title for Englishwomen is so great that peers, beggared by the prodigality of their ancestors, are constantly able to retrieve their fortunes by marriage with heiresses. 1 By the highest estimate, Mulhall's, they were as 13.2 to 64 in 1672. In 1849 they were as 8.19 to 18.65. 2 "It has been calculated," says Fryxell, "that at the beginning of Charles XI.'s reign the population of Sweden and Finland of those times consisted of 1,775,000 persons." - Svea Rikes Historie, xviii. s. 155. Sweden and Finland-the latter enormously benefited by the neighbourhood of St. Petersburg-contained in 1880 a population of about 6,500,000. The emigration from these countries will not add more than half a million to this estimate. 3 It is generally supposed that William III.'s grants to Bentinck, Keppel, and the husband of Lady Elizabeth Villiers, are the last instances of royal gifts on a large scale to favourites. This, however, is not quite the case. Mme. de Walmoden had a peerage and money from George II. Lord Bute is supposed to have received at least £300,000, which the Princess of Wales had saved out of her large revenue (Walpole's Last Journals, i. p. 19), and Greville says of Lady Conyngham, whom George IV. admired: "The wealth she has accumulated by savings and presents must be enormous" (Memoirs, vol. i. p. 212). George III. wrote to Lord North in 1777: "I must insist you will now state to me whether £12,000 or £15,000 will not set your affairs in order; if it will, nay, if £20,000 is necessary, I am resolved you shall have no other person concerned in freeing them but myself." - Letter 410, ed. Donne. But this is a very small part of what the North family got from royal favour. Compare George III.'s letter of December 12, 1778: "Lord Barrington is to wait on Lord North to know what can be done for him. I therefore authorise you to make such a provision as you may think fit." 1 Stanley (of Derby), Neville (of Abergavenny), Courtenay (of Devon), Lumley (of Scarborough), Stourton (of Stourton). 2 3000 acres is the amount taken by Mr. Bateman in his Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland to be the qualification of a great landowner. Now, if we inquire why it is that noble families die out, we shall find that the reason lies in the desire of all their members to maintain themselves in the class they are born into. It is an unwritten law that they must marry money, or not marry at all; and the result is, that when the heir to the title, marrying perhaps late in life, finds his wife sterile-and heiresses are the outcome of families that tend to be sterile-it may easily happen that his younger brothers have not married at all. Often, of course, it is not too late for them to take wives; but if the peer in possession has daughters on whom the unentailed property will be settled, a man confirmed in bachelor habits will often hesitate before he marries only to continue the title. Now it is the boast of Englishmen that our aristocracy is a supremely reasonable one, that there is no nobility clinging to the children of cadets, and that the highest peer marries freely into the commercial classes, and has done so for centuries past without requiring sixteen quarters in a wife, or even two generations of gentility. All the more noteworthy is it that family after family passes away as if it were laden with a mysterious curse. The instance cited above, which shows how few of our nobles are as old as the first Tudor, may seem an unfair one, as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were times of unsettlement, when many families were deprived of the peerage by attainder, or ruined by confiscations. An example from comparatively modern |