The modern phase of this movement, soon after which our precise
knowledge begins, may be said to date from the industrial expansion,
due to the introduction of machinery, which Professor Marshall places
in England about the year 1760. That represents the beginning of an era
in which all civilised and semi-civilised countries are still living.
For the earlier centuries we lack precise data, but we are able to form
certain probable conclusions. The population of a country in those ages
seems to have grown very slowly and sometimes even to have retrograded.
At the end of the sixteenth century the population of England and Wales
is estimated at five millions and at the end of the seventeenth at six
millions--only 20 per cent. increase during the century--although
during the nineteenth century the population nearly quadrupled. This
very gradual increase of the population seems to have been by no means
due to a very low birth-rate, but to a very high death-rate. Throughout
the Middle Ages a succession of virulent plagues and pestilences
devastated Europe. Small-pox, which may be considered the latest of
these, used to sweep off large masses of the youthful population in the
eighteenth century. The result was a certain stability and a certain
well-being in the population as a whole, these conditions being,
however, maintained in a manner that was terribly wasteful and
distressing.
The industrial revolution introduced a new era which began to show its
features clearly in the early nineteenth century.
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