People increase in proportion to the number of marriages, and that is greater in proportion to the ease and convenience of supporting a family. When families can be easily supported, more persons marry, and earlier in life.
In cities, where all trades, occupations and offices are full, many delay marrying, till they can see how to bear the charges of a family; which charges are greater in cities, as Luxury is more common: many live single during life, and continue servants to families, journeymen to Trades, &c. hence cities do not by natural generation supply themselves with inhabitants; the deaths are more than the births.”
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The great increase of Offspring in particular families is not always owing to greater fecundity of Nature, but sometimes to examples of industry in the Heads, and industrious education; by which the children are enabled to provide better for themselves, and their marrying early is encouraged from the prospect of good subsistence.
If there be a sect therefore, in our nation, that regard Frugality and Industry as religious duties, and educate their children therein, more than others commonly do, such sect must consequently increase more by natural generation, than any other sect in Britain.
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The importation of foreigners into a country that has as many inhabitants as the present employments and provisions for subsistence will bear, will be in the end no increase of people; unless the new comers have more industry and frugality than the natives, and then they will provide more Subsistence, and increase in the country; but they will gradually eat the natives out. Nor is it necessary to bring in foreigners to fill up any occasional vacancy in a country; for such vacancy (if the Laws are good, 14, 16) will soon be filled by natural generation. Who can now find the vacancy made in Sweden, France or other warlike nations, by the Plague of heroism forty Years ago; in France by the expulsion of the Protestants; in England by the settlement of her Colonies; or in Guinea, by one hundred years exportation of slaves, that has blacken’d half America?
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