Wesley Corpus

increasing or decreasing?” Increasing or decreasing, in what respects? I beg leave to offer you, on this head, some of the most sensible remarks I have seen on the subject, with some little variations and additions: “The state of the nation has respect to nine capital articles; population, agriculture, manufactures; the land and fresh-water carriage of goods, salt-water carriage of goods; the state of our fisheries at home and abroad, the tendency of our taxes, the clear amount of the revenue, and the national debt. All of these, taken together, form that complex idea which we call ‘the state of the nation.’ “In order therefore to know the state of the nation, we should compare each of these articles, as they subsist at present, with the like articles as they subsisted in some former period, in order to see whether our national affairs have gone backward or forward since that time. And what time more proper than the year 1759?--that period of glory and of conquest, when everything was supposed to go right, as we are told that everything now goes wrong.” 1. “Im regard to population, it is to be feared that our numbers have decreased since the year 1759.” This has been boldly affirmed, and that over and over; yet I cannot allow it by any means; and I have such opportunities of being informed as few persons in England have; as I see almost all the large towns in the kingdom, once in two years at least, and can there fore make these inquiries on the spot, as minutely as I please. We may allow, that within this time, twenty or thirty thousand English soldiers have been sent abroad. Allow, likewise, seventy or eighty thousand emigrants, from England and Scotland only. Hereby there is a decrease of an hundred thousand, within less than twenty years. I read likewise, in a very beautiful Poem, of a “Deserted”--what? province? county? metropolis ? No-‘‘Village,” somewhere on the Wiltshire Downs! Yet not quite deserted; for a gentleman who lives there informs me, he cannot learn it has had more inhabitants within these hundred years than it has at this day. I allow too, that some of the villages near the Land’s End are less populous than formerly; but what is all this loss, taken together, in comparison of the increase?