Page:The Effects of Civilisation on the People in European States.djvu/30

8 necessary to their subsistence; for, where their subsistence is better, we see they actually increase much the faster.

In America, the land is not engrossed by a few, in the manner it is in Europe. It is easy there for a man to procure ground sufficient to produce what nature requires for the preservation and health of his offspring: the consequence is, that the inhabitants increase much faster than they do in Europe; some states doubling every fourteen years, others every twenty years. This happy effect may in part be owing to their being exempted from the many destructive employments to which most Europeans are subjected; but, whichever of those ways it be, it is still to be ascribed to their not being arrived at the state of extreme civilisation.

We do not suppose that even this, the greatest increase that happens in America, is the greatest possible; or that it is so great as would actually be, if the people and their offspring were well supplied with everything nature requires, since in America, on account of the great labour in clearing the ground for cultivation, the quantity tilled by the first planters may frequently be too scanty. But if any European state, consisting of ten millions, were to increase in the proportion they do in America, viz., to double in twenty years, they