Of the checks to population poverty; and as we must suppose that the opinions of such men, and the laws founded upon them, would have considerable influence, it is probable that the preventive check to increase from late marriages and other causes operated to a considerable degree among the free citizens of Greece. For the positive checks to population we need not look beyond the wars in which these small states were almost continually engaged, though we have an account of one wasting plague, at least, in Athens; and Plato supposes the case of his republic being greatly reduced by disease.' Their wars were not only almost constant, but extremely bloody. In a small army the whole of which would probably be engaged in close fight, a much greater number in proportion would be slain, than in the large modern armies, a considerable part of which often remains untouched; and as all the free citizens of these republics were generally employed as soldiers in every war, losses would be felt very severely, and would not appear to be very easily repaired. 1 De legibus, lib. v. * Hume, Essay, xi. p. 451. CHAPTER XIV. Of the Checks to Population among the Romans. THE havoc made by war in the smaller states of Italy, particularly during the first struggles of the Romans for power, seems to have been still greater than in Greece. Wallace, in his dissertation on the numbers of mankind, after alluding to the multitudes which fell by the sword in these times, observes, "On an accurate review of the history of the Italians during this period, we "shall wonder how such vast multitudes could be "raised as were engaged in those continual wars "till Italy was entirely subdued." And Livy expresses his utter astonishment that the Volsci and Æqui, so often as they were conquered, should have been able to bring fresh armies into the field. But these wonders will perhaps be sufficiently accounted for if we suppose what seems to be highly probable, that the constant drains from wars, had in vol. i. 1 Dissertation, p. 62. 8vo. 1763, Edinburgh. 2 Lib. vi. c. xii. u Of the checks to population troduced the habit of giving nearly full scope to the power of population, and that a much greater number of youths, in proportion to the whole people, were yearly rising into manhood and becoming fit to bear arms, than is usual in other states not similarly circumstanced. It was, without doubt, the rapid influx of these supplies, which enabled them, like the ancient Germans, to astonish future histo. rians, by renovating in so extraordinary a manner their defeated and half destroyed armies. 1 Yet there is reason to believe that the practice of infanticide prevailed in Italy, as well as in Greece, from the earliest times. A law of Romulus forbad the exposing of children before they were three years old, 1 which implies that the custom of exposing them as soon as they were born had before prevailed. But this practice was of course never resorted to, but when the drains from wars were insufficient to make room for the rising generation; and consequently though it may be considered as one of the positive checks to the full power of increase, yet, in the actual state of things, it certainly contributed rather to promote than impede population. Dionysius Halicarn. lib. ii. 15. among the Romans. Among the Romans themselves, engaged as they were in incessant wars from the beginning of their republic to the end of it, many of which were dreadfully destructive, the positive check to population from this cause alone must have been enormously great. But this cause alone, great as it was, would never have occasioned that want of Roman citizens, under the emperors, which prompted Augustus and Trajan to issue laws for the encouragement of marriage and of children, if other causes still more powerful in depopulation had not concurred. When the equality of property, which had formerly prevailed in the Roman territory, had been destroyed by degrees, and the land had fallen into the hands of a few great proprietors, the citizens who were by this change successively deprived of the means of supporting themselves, would natu rally have no resource to prevent them from starving, but that of selling their labor to the rich, as in modern states; but from this resource they were completely cut off by the prodigious number of slaves, which, increasing by constant influx with the increasing luxury of Rome, filled up every employment both in agriculture and manufactures. Under such circumstances, so far from being as Of the checks to population tonished that the number of free citizens should decrease, the wonder seems to be, that any should exist beside the proprictors. And in fact many could not have existed but for a strange and preposterous custom, which however, perhaps, the strange and unnatural state of the city required, that of distributing vast quantities of corn to the poorer citizens gratis. Two hundred thousand received this distribution in Augustus's time; and it is highly probable that a great part of them had little else to depend upon. It is supposed to have been given to every man of full years; but the quantity was not enough for a family and too much for an individual. It could not therefore enable them to increase; and, from the manner in which Plutarch speaks of the custom of exposing children among the poor, there is great reason to believe that many were destroyed in spite of the jus trium liberorum. The passage in Tacitus in which, speaking of the Germans, he alludes to this custom in Rome seems to point to the same 1 Hume, Essay xi. p. 488. |