STATE OF. ENGLAND IN 1G85.

279

About the same time King William the Third was desirous c J I I j p -to ascertain the comparative strength of the religious sectsinto which the community was divided. An inquiry wasinstituted; and reports were laid before him from all thedioceses of the realm. According to these reports thenumber of his English subjects must have been about fivemillion two hundred thousand. * **

Lastly, in our own days, Mr. Finlaison, an actuary ofeminent skill, subjected the ancient parochial registers to allthe tests which the modern improvements in statistical scienceenabled him to apply. His opinion was, that, at the closeof the seventeenth century, the population of England wasa little under five million two hundred thousand souls.*’

Of these three estimates, framed without concert bydifferent persons from different sets of materials, the highest,which is that of King, does not exceed the lowest, which isthat of Finlaison, by one twelfth. We may, therefore, withconfidence pronounce that, when James the Second reigned,

England contained between five million and five million fivehundred thousand inhabitants. On the very highest suppo-sition she then had less than one third of her present popu-lation, and less than three times the population which is nowcollected in her gigantic capital.

The increase of the people has been great in every partof the kingdom, but generally much greater in the northern Mon

° 1 13 <* ® greater in

than in the southern shires. In truth a large part of the the north •country beyond Trent was, down to the eighteenth century, the south,in a state of barbarism. Physical and moral causes had con-curred to prevent civilisation from spreading to that region.

* Dalrymple’s Appendix to Part II. Book I. The practice of reckon-ing the population by sects was long fashionable. Gulliver says ofthe King of Brobdingnag, “He laughed at my odd arithmetic, as ne waspleased to call it, in reckoning the numbers of our people by a compu-tation drawn from the several sects among us in religion and politics.”

** Preface to the Population Returns of 1831.