The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches-2 [133]
the registered baptisms expressed the full fecundity of the marriages of England?" Assuredly, if the registers of England are so defective as to explain the difference which, on our calculation, exists between the fecundity of the peers and the fecundity of the people, no argument against Mr Sadler's theory can be drawn from that difference. But what becomes of all the other arguments which Mr Sadler has founded on these very registers? Above all, what becomes of his comparison between the censuses of England and France? In the pamphlet before us, he dwells with great complacency on a coincidence which seems to him to support his theory, and which to us seems, of itself, sufficient to overthrow it. "In my table of the population of France in the forty-four departments in which there are from one to two hectares to each inhabitant, the fecundity of 100 marriages, calculated on the average of the results of the three computations relating to different periods given in my table, is 406 7/10. In the twenty- two counties of England in which there is from one to two hectares to each inhabitant, or from 129 to 259 on the square mile,--beginning, therefore, with Huntingdonshire, and ending with Worcestershire,--the whole number of marriages during ten years will be found to amount to 379,624, and the whole number of the births during the same term to 1,545,549--or 407 1/10 births to 100 marriages! A difference of one in one thousand only, compared with the French proportion!" Does not Mr Sadler see that, if the registers of England, which are notoriously very defective, give a result exactly corresponding almost to an unit with that obtained from the registers of France, which are notoriously very full and accurate, this proves the very reverse of what he employs it to prove? The correspondence of the registers proves that there is no correspondence in the facts. In order to raise the average fecundity of England even to the level of the average fecundity of the peers of the three kingdoms, which is 3.81 to a marriage, it is necessary to add nearly six per cent. to the number of births given in the English registers. But, if this addition be made, we shall have, in the counties of England, from Huntingdonshire to Worcestershire inclusive, 4.30 births to a marriage or thereabouts: and the boasted coincidence between the phenomena of propagation in France and England disappears at once. This is a curious specimen of Mr Sadler's proficiency in the art of making excuses. In the same pamphlet he reasons as if the same registers were accurate to one in a thousand, and as if they were wrong at the very least by one in eighteen. He tries to show that we have not taken a fair criterion of the fecundity of the peers. We are not quite sure that we understand his reasoning on this subject. The order of his observations is more than usually confused, and the cloud of words more than usually thick. We will give the argument on which he seems to lay most stress in his own words:-- "But I shall first notice a far more obvious and important blunder into which the Reviewer has fallen; or into which, I rather fear, he knowingly wishes to precipitate his readers, since I have distinctly pointed out what ought to have preserved him from it in the very chapter he is criticising and contradicting. It is this:--he has entirely omitted 'counting' the sterile marriages of all those peerages which have become extinct during the very period his counting embraces. He counts, for instance, Earl Fitzwilliam, his marriages, and heir; but has he not omitted to enumerate the marriages of those branches of the same noble house, which have become extinct since that venerable individual possessed his title? He talks of my having appealed merely to the extinction of peerages in my argument; but, on his plan of computation, extinctions are perpetually and wholly lost sight of. In computing the average prolificness of the marriages of the nobles, he positively counts from a select class of them only, one from which the unprolific are constantly weeded,