reciting that "great inconveniences have been found by experience to grow by the erecting and building of great numbers and multitude of cottages, which are daily more and more increased in many parts of this realm," enacts that, for the time to come, no such tenement shall be erected, unless four acres of land be attached to it.* With a similar view was the act or proclamation (for in Elizabeth's reign they were nearly synonymous) issued in 1581, forbidding the erection of new buildings within three miles of the city gates, and limiting the number of inmates in a house to one family. In the year 1630 Charles I. issued a similar proclamation against building houses on new foundations in London or Westminster, or within three miles of the city or the king's palaces. The proclamation also forbade the receiving of inmates in houses, which (it was said) would multiply the inhabitants to such an excessive number, that they could neither be governed nor fed! There are, however, some judicious regulations in this proclamation for the prevention of fires and the preservation of the health of the inhabitants. All new houses are directed to have partywalls and fronts of brick; and the windows to be higher than wide, both for the admission of air, and for rendering the piers between them more solid than they would otherwise have been. These provisions have been consider

In the year 1638 there was a special commission from Charles I. for enforcing this statute.-Rymer's Fœdera, 20, 256. The act of Elizabeth is repealed by 15 Geo. III. c. 23.

ably enlarged by subsequent statutes, particularly by the Building Act, the enforcing of which (though imperfect in its provisions) has doubtless greatly contributed towards the health, the safety, and the beauty of the metropolis.

The deterioration in the cirumstances of the people, no less than the public acts, are evidence of the increasing pressure of population. In 1495 a labourer could purchase with his wages 199 pints of wheat; in the year 1593 only 82 pints; in 1610 only 46 pints. So that in the reign of James I., a labourer could obtain only one-fourth part of the necessaries and conveniences which he obtained in the reign of Henry VII.* The increase of indigence was accompanied with its usual calamity, an increase of crime. A magistrate of Somersetshire, writing in 1596, affirms that " forty persons had been executed in that county in a year, for various felonies, thirty-five burnt in the hand, thirty-seven whipped, one hundred and eighty-three discharged; that those who were discharged, were most wicked and desperate persons, who never would come to any good, because they would not work, and none would take them into service: that notwithstanding the great number of indictments, the fifth part of the felonies committed in the county, were not brought to trial; and the greater number escaped censure, either from the superior cunning of the felons, the remissness of the magistrates, or the foolish lenity

On the Growing Excess of Population, 10. By John Barton, London, 1830.

of the people. That the other counties of England were in no better condition than Somersetshire, and some of them in a worse.'

The struggle between law and criminality-legislation and a growing population-schemes of charitable relief-and the increasing privations of the people, appear to have terminated in the severe visitations of pestilence in the succeeding century. In the year 1603 no less than 36,000 persons were swept off in London alone; twenty years after, about the same number perished; in 1636 above 10,000 died; and 68,596 persons died in the last great plague of 1665! The conflagration which destroyed the city occurred in 1666; after which, the plague languished, and finally disappeared from the bills of mortality in 1679. The destruction of capital and industry, involved in these terrible disasters, had a sensible influence on the progress of the country during the next hundred years. Population only again began to increase rapidly about the year 1780. From the survey made to meet the Spanish invasion, in 1575, the aggregate population of the kingdom has been estimated at four and a half millions.+ According to the inquiries of Mr. Rickman, it amounted only to 5,475,000 in 1700; in the next fifty years, it increased only about a million: but, in the fifty years that have elapsed, from 1780 to 1831, it has increased from 7,953,000, to 13,894,574.

In the opinion of Mr. Barton, the present state of

* Eden's State of the Poor, vol i. p. 111.

+ Supplement to Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. iv. p. 149.

the country resembles that which marked the close of the reign of Elizabeth. Both periods exhibit symptoms of the population having outgrown the existing means of employment and subsistence. In both there is a diminution in the rate of wages, and of course, in the means of procuring, by the body of the people, a sufficiency of wholesome food, needful clothing, good lodging, and the other necessaries of life. Let us, however, hope, that the catastrophe will be different; and that the foreknowledge of a more enlightened age, will avert the frightful calamities of the former era!

Although the population, on the accession of the Stuarts, was little more than one-third of what it is at present, it appears to have been considered excessive, by the statesmen of that day; and doubtless, was so measured by the productive resources of the country: for the redundancy of the people is not to be estimated by their numerical amount, but by the proportion they bear to the means for their support, accommodation, and employment. We may smile at the fears of Charles the First, that the capital would become so large, that it could neither be "governed nor fed." This, however, might be a reasonable apprehension two centuries ago, when London was, doubtless, a huge and unsightly spectacle-appearing something like modern Constantinople to an European-without police or local conveniences.* But its means have increased

* The population of the city of London, in the beginning of he last century, was not much less than 140,000, and the an

with its wants, and our ancestors would have been quite incredulous, had they been told that it would, hereafter, contain one-third as many inhabitants as the whole country in the days of Lord Burleigh; and they would have been still harder of belief, had they been assured, that with this vast assemblage of human beings, it was more orderly, more amply supplied with water and provisions, more salubrious, and less crowded, than when it contained only onetenth of the number. What would have been a string of paradoxes in the sixteenth century, have become absolute facts in the nineteenth. It shows that mankind are not prophets in any age, and, that great prospective evils are often balanced and counteracted by accompanying advantages.

For

nual mortality was as one to twenty of that population. tunately for the health of the citizens, space is become more valuable for warehouses than for human habitations, so that the population of the city within the walls is diminished to 55,778, and the rate of mortality to less than one in forty.-Remarks by John Rickman, prefixed to Population Returns of 1831. The average deaths in the Metropolis are about one-fifth less than those in Paris; and the average mortality in the former differs only by a small fraction from that of the whole of France. The annual deaths in Vienna average 1 in 22 of the inhabitants; Amsterdam, 1 in 24; Rome, in 25; Madrid, 1 in 29: nearly equal to the mortality in London 130 years since.