At the end of6years64
”16”40
”26”25
”36”16
”46”10
”56”6
”60”3
”76”1
”80”0

He says gravely of another of his calculations, “According to this proportion Adam and Eve, doubling themselves every 64 years of the 5610 years, which is the age of the world according to the Scriptures, shall produce far more people than are now in it. Wherefore, the world is not above 100,000 years old, as some vainly imagine, nor above what the Scripture makes it.”

That Captain Graunt was a man of no ordinary perceptive power let his volume bear witness. In it he touches on almost every intricate question which, despised when he wrote, has since been investigated by Adam Smith, by M’Culloch, by Porter, by Tooke, and by all to whom political economy is dear. The following will give some idea of the character of these studies:—

“It were good to know how much hay an acre of every sort of meadow will bear; how many cattle the same weight of each sort of hay will feed and fatten; what quantity of grain and other commodities the same acre will bear in 3 or 7 years; unto what use each sort is most proper; all which particulars I call the intrinsic value, for there is another value merely accidental or extrinsic, consisting of the causes why a parcel of land lying near a good market may be worth double another parcel, though but of the same intrinsic goodness; which answers the question why lands in the north of England are worth but 16 years purchase and those of the west above 28.” “Moreover, if all these things were clearly and truly known, it would appear how small a part of the people work upon necessary labours and callings; how many women and children do just nothing, only learning to spend what others get; how many are mere voluptuaries, and as it were, mere gamesters by trade; how many live by puzzling poor people with unintelligible notions in divinity and philosophy; how many, by persuading credulous, delicate, and religious persons that their bodies or estates are out of tune and in danger; how many, by fighting as soldiers; how many, by ministries of vice and sin; how many, by trades of mere pleasure or ornament; and how many, in a way of lazy attendance on others; and, on the other side, how few are employed in raising necessary food and covering; and of the speculative men how few do study nature, the more ingenious not advancing much further than to write and speak wittily about these matters.”

From this enumeration of his objects it may be seen that life assurance was not contemplated by the author when his important book was written; but as the earliest attempt to number the people, to classify their callings, and to ascertain the mortality among them, he assuredly laid the foundations of this science. His book gave new ideas. It first propounded the fact, that “the more sickly the years are, the less fruitful of children they be;” and though this was wonderfully ridiculed, time has proved that it was not less strange than true. It formed a taste for similar inquiries among thinking men. It was published at a period when, the city being less populous, there was additional facility in arriving at certain facts. From that time the subject was cultivated more and more. Increased attention was paid to the parish registers. The different diseases and casualties were gradually inserted; but it was not till 1728 that the ages of the dead were introduced. Graunt had forced people to think; and whatever merit may be ascribed to Sir William Petty, Daniel King, Dr. Davenant, and others, it may all be traced to the first observations of Graunt on the Bills of Mortality. To him we owe the care with which parish registers have since been kept, and the valuable material they have afforded to the science of political economy.

There is something in the old registers which places us in an almost antediluvian world, and seems to treat of diseases belonging to another sphere. In 1657, among the deaths are recorded 1162 “chrisomes and infants;” and few reading in 1853 would know that infants, until christened, wore a “chrisom” or cloth anointed with holy unguent, from which they were denominated chrisomes. “Blasted and planet” would puzzle the medical student of to-day; but the latter was simply an abbreviation of “planet struck,” both words indicating some wasting disease which the faculty failed to fathom. “Head-mould-shot” and “horseshoe-head” were meant for water on the brain, and were very expressive of the shape of the head in those who suffered from it. Another complaint was “calenture,” a disease said to be similar to the maladie du pays, for it seized seamen with an irresistible desire to immerse themselves, the sea assuming in their eyes the appearance of green fields. “Tissick” expressed phthisis or consumption. In 1634, the “rickets” is recorded; and the “rising of the lights” has been a great puzzle to our medical historians. A little later than this period is mentioned, “one died from want in Newgate,” “one murdered in the pillory,” and “one killed in the pillory.” In the course of twenty years fifty-one are put down as starved. “But few are murdered, not above eighty-six of the deaths in twenty years; whereas, in Paris, few nights escape without their tragedy.” It must be remembered, in explanation, that medicine had not assumed the dignity of a science before the time of Harvey in the middle of the seventeenth century, but was exercised by “a great multitude of ignorant persons.” Common artificers, smiths, weavers, and women took upon them cures, “to the high displeasure of God, and destruction of many of the King’s liege people.” Nor was the patient much better off when the clergy, priests, and poor scholars left the cure of the mind for the cure of the body. Such, however, was the position of leech-craft when Graunt inoculated the people with the love of vital statistics.

Contemporary with Graunt, and contributor to his attempts, was one of those strange, restless, speculative men whose love of money teaches them how to procure it, and whose desire to preserve it, by purchasing land, and leaving their heirs in possession, makes them the founders of noble English houses. This was Sir William Petty, who, in his “Essay on Political Arithmetick concerning the Growth of the City of London, with the Measures, Periods, Causes, and Consequences thereof,” made a further onward movement. The earlier portion of his life was passed in battling with the world. He was as much a votary of mathematics as of money, and was eminently successful in both. Although only the son of a Romney clothier, he was the founder of a house which has exercised an important influence on English political life—the House of Lansdowne. He began his career with nothing, and he closed it possessed of 15,000l. per annum. He lived at a time when social economy was but little regarded; and he published a volume which, however uncertain both in its data and its conclusions, was an attempt to apply arithmetic to the economics of life. It is both unphilosophical and unjust to say, “Petty was nothing of a politician or statesman, or even of a political economist. He was merely a political arithmetician; that is to say, he occupied himself with a consideration of the circumstances of society and of the forces and activity that pervaded it, only in so far as they could be stated and estimated numerically. His social science was little more than an affair of ciphering, a business of addition and subtraction.” It is from the figures of such men that our politicians form deductions, estimate consequences, frame laws, and create trade. It may be true that he was no seer, and that he was wrong in his prophetic capacity; but this is only another proof that statisticians rarely possess a large development of the imaginative faculty. That his work is worth perusal to all who are interested in his subject, although based on information which was rude and imperfect, we hope to show. In it he calculates that—

Between1604 and 1605,there died in London5,135
”1621 and 1622,”8,527
”1641 and 1642,”11,883
”1661 and 1662,”15,148
”1681 and 1682,”22,331.

In about forty years he estimated that London had doubled itself (the number being, when he wrote, 670,000), and that the assessment of London was about one-eleventh of the whole territory: “Therefore, the people of the whole may be about 7,369,000; with which account that of the poll-money, hearth-money, and the bishops’ late numbering of the communicants, do pretty well agree.” This founder of the House of Lansdowne was a good deal puzzled by the growth of the metropolis. He thus accounts for it:—“The causes of its growth from 1642 to 1682 may be said to have been as follows: From 1642 to 1650, men came out of the country to London to shelter themselves from the outrages of the civil wars during that time. From 1650 to 1660, the royal party came to London for their more private and inexpensive living. From 1660 to 1670, the King’s friends and party came to receive his favours after his happy restoration. From 1670 to 1680, the frequency of plots and parliaments might bring extraordinary numbers to the city. But what reasons to assign for the like increase from 1604 to 1642, I know not, unless I should pick out some remarkable accident happening in each part of the said period, and make that to be the cause of this increase (as vulgar people make the cause of every man’s sickness to be what he did last eat); wherefore, rather than so say, I would rather quit what I have above said to be the cause of London’s increase from 1642 to 1682, and put the whole upon some natural and spontaneous benefits and advantages that men find by living in great more than in small societies: I shall, therefore, seek for the antecedent causes of this growth in the consequences of the like, considered in greater characters and proportions.”

That the people are the life-blood of the kingdom, was Sir William’s fixed belief; and he said, that if the whole highlands of Scotland and the whole kingdom of Ireland were sunk in the ocean, so that the people were all saved and brought to the lowlands of Great Britain, the Sovereign and the subject in general would be enriched. The reader will smile when he hears that a great deal of useful information was embodied in Sir William Petty’s attempts to prove the following extraordinary points:—