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356 ECONOMIC INQUIRIES AND STUD{ES
-statistical records that the questions involved can be
so definitely raised.
As I have stated, it would be foreign to the object
of this paper to discuss fully the various questions thus
brought up for discussion, but one or two observations
may be made, having regard to some inferences which
are somewhat hastily drawn.
I. The rate of growth of population of the com-
munities may still be very cbnsiderable, even if it is
no higher than it has been in the last few years. A
growth of ] 6, 15, or even 12 per cent. in ten years,
owing to the excess of births over deaths, is a very
considerable growth, though it is much. less than the
larger figures which existed in some parts forty or fifty
years ago. What has happened in the United King-
dom is well worth observing in this connection. Since
1840 the population of the United Kingdom as a whole
has increased nearly 60 per cent, although the increase
in most of the decades hardly ever exceeded 8 per
cent., and in 1840-50 was no· more than 21- per cent.
The increase, it must be remembered, goes on at a
compound ratio, and in a few' decades an enormous
change is apparent. The increase from about 170 to
510 millions in the course of the last century among
European people generally, though it includes the
enormous growth of the United States in those decades,
when the rate of growth was at the highest, also in-
cludes the slower growth of other periods, and the
slower growths of other countries. An addition of
even 10 per cent. only as the average every ten years
would far more than double the 500 millions in a
century, and an increase to at least 1,500 millions
during the century now beginning, unless some great
change should occur, would accordingly appear not
improbable.
2. Some of the rates of growth of population from
which there has been a falling off of late years were
obviously quite abnormal. I refer especially to the
growth in Australasia between 1850 and 1880, and the