第20章

In the lower classes of the state also there are men who from pride and from reasons similar to those of the nobility, prefer to live in celibacy and to spend on themselves the little that they have rather than settle down in family life. But most of them would gladly set up a family if they could count upon keeping it up as they would wish: they would consider themselves to do an injustice to their children if they brought them up to fall into a lower class than themselves. Only a few men in a state avoid marriage from sheer flightiness. All the lower orders wish to live and bring up children who can live like themselves.

When labourers and mechanics do not marry it is because they wait till they save something to enable them to set up a household or to find some young woman who brings a little capital for that purpose, since they see every day others like them who for lack of such precaution start housekeeping and fall into the most frightful poverty, being obliged to deprive themselves of their own food to nourish their children.

From the observations of Mr Halley, at Breslaw in Silesia, it is found that of all the females capable of child bearing, from 16 to 45 years of age, not one in six actually bears a child every year, while, says Mr Halley, there ought to be at least 4 or 6 who should have children every year, without including those who are barren or have still births. The reason why four women out of six do not bear children every year is that they cannot marry because of the discouragements and difficulties in their way. A young woman takes care not to become a mother if she is not married; she cannot marry unless she finds a man who is ready to run the risk of it. Most of the people in a state are hired or are undertakers; most are dependent and live in uncertainty whether they will find by their labour or their undertakings the means of supporting their household on the footing they have in view. Therefore they do not all marry, or marry so late that of six women, or at least four, who should produce a child every year there is actually only one in six who becomes a mother.

If the proprietors of land help to support the families, a single generation suffices to push the increase of population as far as the produce of the land will supply means of subsistence.

Children do not require so much of this produce as grown-up persons. Both can live on more or less according to their consumption. The northern people, where the land produces little, have been known to live on so little produce that they have sent out colonists and swarms of men to invade the lands of the south and destroy its inhabitants to appropriate their land. According to the different manner of living, 400,000 people might subsist on the same produce of the land which ordinarily supports but 100,000. A man who lives upon the produce of an acre and a half of land, may be stronger and stouter than he who spends the produce of five or ten acres; it therefore seems pretty clear that the number of inhabitants of a state depends on the means allotted them of obtaining their support; and as this means of subsistence arises from the method of cultivating the soil, and this method depends chiefly on the taste, humours and manner of living of the proprietors of land, the increase and decrease of population also stand on the same foundation.