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connected view of society in the several stages through which it has been found to pass, from the savage condition of man up to the highest state of civilization of which any authentic record is to be found; and even beyond that point, to the highest which he can be thought capable of reaching in the career of wealth and prosperity. These stages naturally separate themselves into four general divisions, viz.: 1. The savage and pastoral; 2. The agricultural; 3. The commercial and manufacturing; 4. The highly civilized and artificial states of society. Into the principles and practices of each of these conditions of society, and of the successive gradations which lead from one to the other, I have entered at some length in a separate chapter devoted to the particular stage then under discussion, and have endeavoured to show in detail the effects which those principles and practices naturally and spontaneously produce upon the progress of population. At the close of each investigation I have attempted to show that the effects produced in every stage of society can be no other than what are enunciated in four preceding propositions. If this attempt has been successful, I am certainly authorized to conclude that they are fundamental axioms of human society universally applicable to the purposes of the political œconomist, and to draw from them, for the benefit of mankind, such inferences as they may be fairly presumed to afford for the regulation and instruction of governments and individuals. For if the propositions be found true in every condition in which human society can subsist, they must doubtless be of universal operation; and being so, it is impossible, consi

dering their obvious importance, moral and political, not to admit that they must lead to practical consequences deeply involving the best interests of mankind.

CHAPTER IV.

Of the natural Tendency of Population in the early Stages of Society.

BEFORE we proceed to a detailed investigation of the state of society among the barbarous, the hunting, or the pastoral tribes of mankind, who roam over millions of fertile but neglected acres, and whose idleness or ignorance condemns them to a scanty subsistence on the spontaneous produce of the earth, the following brief summary may perhaps be fairly introduced.

Throughout the earth, and in every separate division of it, there must have existed, before man could have multiplied so fast as to have occupied the land, a certain portion of animal and vegetable food in what is called a state of nature; offering itself to the first settlers without any labour or precaution of theirs, but simply that of seizing and devouring. This may be called the savage state; and as man in that state has few artifical wants, and therefore no temptation to labour except for food and, perhaps, a scanty portion of raiment, he would go on multiplying his species without regard to the existing quantity of food, till the continued increase of the former came to press upon the absolute quantity of the latter. The natural consequence would then be a degree of ⚫ uneasiness among the inhabitants from a scanty supply of food; and two consequences must inevitably ensue: either contentions among the people for the food, in which the strongest would enjoy plenty and

the weaker starve; or an agreement among them to enlarge the means of their subsistence by domesticating some of the wild animals, thereby emerging from the savage state, and making the first step in the progress of civilization. It is impossible for a society to exist for many generations without making this transition, unless repressed by their own vices, or the selfish and cruel interference of others; for naturally the pressure introduced by the increase of mankind, though it might at first produce contests for the existing supply of food, yet, considering the inconveniences attending them, would soon produce another arrangement, unless it were artificially prevented. Some of the most acute among the savages, observing the docile nature of many animals, and that their docility is perhaps proportioned to their domestic utility when tamed, would set about the task of reducing them to a state in which, without further diminishing the relative proportion of their numbers to mankind, they might afford a continual supply to their wants. Milk, and its various com binations, the changes of aliment to which it is convertible, and the slaughter only of the superfluous increase of the herds and flocks, with occasional assistance derived from the wild animals still escaped from extermination, would be the regimen of this second stage of society in all widely-extended tracts of country; and it may be called the pastoral state of society. Upon this system it is evident that a much larger number of persons can be supported on the same extent of territory; the animals become more numerous and healthy by being reduced under the management of those who apportion to each herd and flock its requisite extent of pasture, and

prevent the waste and accidents to which their erratic state is liable. The soil itself becomes capable of supporting a larger number; the less wasteful method of supplying man with food by the extraction of other nutriment from animals than mere flesh, creates a smaller demand upon the increased stock; and the progressive power of the country is improved in the double ratio of augmented force and removed obstruction. But as in land in a state of nature the capability of supporting herds and flocks is absolute, and determinable in no very long period of time, and as people increase at least as fast in a pastoral as in a savage state, the pressure of population will soon come to operate upon this increased supply; and the same necessity for contention, or rather perhaps for farther production, will occur. Observation quickened by necessity will have pointed out to some of the shepherds the vegetables most suited to their taste or climate; and the step from that observation to the cultivation of a small portion of the earth with rude instruments of agriculture, such as, first, a stake from a tree, next, one sharpened at the end with a flint, &c. is but a trifling advance in human intellect. But the increase it gives to the supply of food by introducing an enlarged supply of vegetable without materially reducing animal sustenance, greatly enlarges the power of the earth to support mankind; and a third stage in the progress of society ensues, that of the early and rude agricultural state—a change accompanied with this very important circumstance, that as it becomes the interest of the society that every man should be secure of the soilhe cultivates, and that the whole society should ensure the whole collected produce by their protection,

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