14. Hence the prince, that acquires new territory, if he finds it vacant, or removes the natives to give his own people room;—the legislator, that makes effectual laws for promoting of trade, increasing employment, improving land by more or better tillage, providing more food by fisheries, securing property, &c.—and the man that invents new trades, arts or manufactures, or new improvements in husbandry, may be properly called fathers of their nation, as they are the cause of the generation of multitudes, by the encouragement they afford to marriage.
15. As to privileges granted to the married, (such as the jus trium liberorum among the Romans) they may hasten the filling of a country, that has been thinned by war or pestilence, or that has otherwise vacant territory, but cannot increase a people beyond the means provided for their subsistence.
16. Foreign luxuries, and needless manufactures, imported and used in a nation, do, by the same reasoning, increase the people of the nation, that furnishes them, and diminish the people of the nation, that uses them. Laws, therefore, that prevent such importations, and, on the contrary, promote the exportation of manufactures to be consumed in foreign countries, may be called (with respect to the people that make them) generative laws, as, by increasing subsistence, they encourage marriage. Such laws likewise strengthen a country doubly, by increasing its own people, and diminishing its neighbours.
17. Some European nations prudently refuse to consume the manufactures of East India:—they should likewise forbid them to their colonies; for the gain to the merchant is not to be compared with the loss, by this means, of people to the nation.
18. Home luxury in the great increases the nation's manufacturers employed by it, who are many, and only tends to diminish the families that indulge in it, who are few. The greater the common fashionable expence of any rank of people, the more cautious they are of marriage. Therefore luxury should never be suffered to become common.
19. 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.
20. 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.
21. 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 40 years ago; in France, by the expulsion of the protestants; in England, by the settlement of her colonies; or in Guinea by a hundred years exportation of slaves, that has blackened half America? The thinness of the inhabitants in Spain is owing to national pride, and idleness, and other causes, rather than to the expulsion, of the Moors, or to the making of new settlements.
22. There is, in short, no bound to the prolific nature of plants or animals, but what is made by their crowding and interfering with each other's means of subsistence. Was the face of the earth vacant of other plants, it might be gradually sowed and the overspread with one kind only, as for instance, with fennel; and were it empty of other inhabitants, it might, in a few ages, be replenished from one nation only, as for instance, with Englishmen. Thus there are supposed to be now upwards of one million of English souls in North America (though it is thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over sea) and yet perhaps there is not one the fewer in Britain, but rather many more, on account of the employment the colonies afford to manufacturers at home. This million doubling, suppose but once in 25 years, will, in another century, be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side the water. What an accession of power to the British empire by sea as well as land! What increase of trade and navigation! What numbers of ships and seamen! We have been here but little more than a hundred years, and yet the force of our privateers in the late war, united, was greater, both in men and guns, than that of the whole British navy in queen Elizabeth's time. How important an affair then to Britain is the present treaty[78] for settling the bounds between her colonies and the French! and how careful should she be to secure, room enough, since on the room depends so much the increase of her people?
23. In fine, a nation well regulated is like a polypus[79], take away a limb, its place is soon supplied; cut it in two, and each deficient part shall speedily grow out of the part remaining. Thus, if you have room and subsistence enough, as you may, by dividing, make ten polypuses out of one, you may, of one, make ten nations, equally populous and powerful; or, rather, increase a nation tenfold in numbers and strength.