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There is one point in which the United States army greatly differs from the English. A man enlists in the American army for five years, and may go on enlisting until he has served thirty years, when he may retire on a pension of threequarters of his then pay and allowances. He cannot possibly buy himself out. Discharges before the expiry of the term of service are only given for disability, or by sentence of a general courtmartial, or by particular favour of the Government for special reasons, when backed by some influential civilian. Probably more men desert than are discharged in any one of these modes, for there are 3000 to 7000 desertions each year from an army of 25,000 men. This is mainly due to restlessness under the peculiar method of enforcing discipline, the hard work, and the lack of amusement. No officer has a right to inflict punishment, no matter how slight the offence, except after trial by court-martial. Hence a year's court-martials number from 10,000 to 12,000, and delinquents are punished often justly in irregular ways. Though the standard of drill is not high, the chief part of the soldier's work is fatigue-duty. This consists not merely in keeping the barracks in order and in repair, but in roadmaking, drain-digging, cutting and carrying timber, clearing and levelling ground, or even building in and near the post. A fatigueday varies from eight to ten hours, and a soldier on regular duty will find himself on the fatigue detail at least twice a-week.

fact, the few who read at all study cheap reprints of inferior fiction. Some sleep through the daytime, while others cheat one another at cards. Outside the barracks relaxation is sought in drunkenness and coarse excess. These indulgences can scarcely be obtained where there is no town in the neighbourhood. The period of service, too, has to be passed in climates that are malarious, or vary from tropical to arctic temperature at the different seasons. During his enlistment the soldier is debarred from all respectable civilian associates; for the native American shows only contempt for his soldiers. He rarely enlists, unless in misfortune, when he does not generally serve five years. Accordingly, the English recruit will find that the rank and file are mainly, like himself, foreigners, but mostly Germans or Irish. He will have to exercise considerable tact in order to avoid being made a scapegoat for the well-known centuries of English misrule in Ireland. The American soldiers are mainly drawn from the same class as the English soldiers-men described by the Duke of Wellington as the scum of society. The American soldiers differ somewhat from the English, because they are the scum not of a nation merely, but of the refuse of two continents.

A man of education who enlists will find the duties severe and the society degrading. If he has character and abilities that will keep him from utterly degrading himself, he will find, after he has obtained his commission or has served his five years scathless, that he has so laboured to pass through the ordeal that in any other career of life he would In have risen to the highest pin

The strongest excitement is demanded as relief from these labours. Legends, indeed, are told of men who have occupied their leisure while in the ranks by preparing for civil professions.

nacle of success he could hope to reach in that time. A young man who enlists in the English army generally has friends who will buy his discharge, and has and can keep, even in the ranks, some social position. In the United States army he can do neither. Consequently, most of those who become deserters are those who enlisted at first solely for the love of warlike adventure and military display, with an honourable ambition of distinguishing themselves in their chosen profession.

It is perhaps unfortunate for our recruiting officers that a knowledge of the advantages, but not of the hardships, of the American service is widely diffused among

the lower classes in England and Ireland. Moreover, there is nourished in the rank and file of the British army a tradition, now almost certainly a myth, that the United States Government will find a passage and a welcome for a British soldier who wishes to cross the Atlantic. It is certain that a man who gets into trouble can raise enough by the sale of his uniform to take him over. Though these men are bad bargains for either Government, they account for a large proportion of British desertions. The practice might increase in certain junctures so as to become a real danger to the defensive forces of the British empire.

THE POPULATION OF OLD LONDON.

THE great age of Elizabeth produced, among other excellent things, John Stow's 'Survey of London.' Love of country, and a more special pride in the city where he was born, could alone have led him to be so particular in his descriptions of every corner of the capital, and to spend so much time in searching out the history of buildings and the fame of citizens from old records. The quondam tailor of Aldgate knew that he was a citizen of no mean city: he seems to have taken to heart literally the injunctions of the Psalmist, to walk about Sion and go round about her, and to tell that this man and that man was born in her. The result of his consuming zeal was to himself an impoverished old age; to us the outcome of it is that we have a real and living picture of the London of Elizabeth and of Shakespeare, such as, the learned say, exists for no other capital at any period of history.

With all his fulness of detail, and thoroughness in going over the ground, Stow makes no attempt to sum up the number of the inhabitants. His knowledge of every street and lane, and of the houses in them, was minute enough to have qualified him for making a computation of the people with some approach to accuracy. But the only reference to the subject is in an essay, apparently by another hand, which he prints at the end of the 'Survey' of 1598, upon a theme which then occupied much attention—namely, the utmost numbers that could be governed, fed, and kept in health within the limit of a civic community.

VOL. CXLIX.-NO. DCCCCVI.

The essay cites the opinion of one Hippodamus, that 10,000 was that limit, and casually adds that London far exceeded it.

The art of taking a census cannot have been altogether unknown in the London of Elizabeth. When it was desired to know the number of foreigners in the capital, they were found, on the 20th January 1564, to be 4534; when they were next counted, in 1571, their number had grown to 7143. That census, partial as it is, has a great historic interest. It was just at that time that London was acquiring the position which the City has held ever since, as the centre of foreign trade. The Royal Exchange was founded in 1566 on a scale which shows the penetration of Sir Thomas Gresham: Stow says that eighty households were displaced to clear the site on Cornhill. The increase of foreigners between 1564 and 1571, of which we have the probably exact figures, is a concrete expression of the start which the City then took as the emporium of Europe.

The first attempt at a census of London was in August 1631, when the mayor was ordered by the Privy Council, in a season of scarcity, to find out how many people the City and Liberties contained. The number was then found, by some method which must have been highly defective, to be 130,178, of whom 47,845 were in the Liberties, including Southwark. Howel, in his Londinopolis' of 1657, which is mostly plagiarised from Stow, says that in 1636, on an occasion of a census of Papists and strangers, the mayor made "a cense of all the

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people, and there were of men, women, and children, above seven hundred thousand that lived within the bars of his jurisdiction alone," which Howel brings up to a million and a half by additions for out-parishes. When the Royal Society was founded shortly after, the population of London became one of its first subjects of inquiry. In 1665 it caused to be reprinted the 'Natural and Political Observations upon the Bills of Mortality,' by Captain John Graunt, F.R.S., of Birchin Lane (1st ed., 1662), in which work the first estimate that was ever attempted from the annual christenings and burials showed the population in 1661 to be 460,000 in all London, including Southwark, Westminster, and the out-parishes.

It was only after some religious hesitation that Graunt brought himself to compute the number of the people; but he was at length provoked into doing so by the wild statements made to him on the subject by eminent citizens :

"I have been several times in company with men of great experience in this city, and have heard them talk seldom under millions of people to be in London; all which I was apt enough to believe, until, on a certain day, one of eminent reputation [an alderman] was upon occasion asserting that there was in the year 1661 two millions of people more than anno 1625, before the great plague [of that year]. I must confess that until this provocation I had been frighted with that misunderstood example of David from attempting any computation of the people of this populous place; but hereupon I both examined the lawfulness of making such inquiries, and, being satisfied thereof, went about the work in this

manner."

A calculator by the same method as Graunt was Sir William Petty,

who estimated the inhabitants in 1683 and again in 1699. In his first essay, bringing the figures down to 1682, he reckoned, from the annual burials and christenings kept by the Company of Parish Clerks, that the population had increased to 669,930; and he came to nearly the same result by taking the number of inhabited houses at 84,000, and allowing eight persons to each household. In his other essay,

of 1699, he was able to adduce a certificate from the Hearth Office that the houses within the bills were 105,315: adding onetenth, or 10,531, for double families, but now allowing only six persons to each, he brought the number of people in London in that year to 695,076. More than a generation later, Maitland, in his 'History of London,' also adopted the double method of reckoning, from the annual births and deaths, and from the number of inhabited houses. By a laborious inquiry he found the latter to be 95,968; but as he had reason, from the ascertained facts in the parish of St Giles'-in-theFields, to think that the houses were more crowded than before, he averaged the occupants of each

at as much more than seven as would bring out the same total that he got from the annual births and deaths (corrected for omissions) — namely, 725,903 in the year 1737. When the first census was taken in 1801, the numbers were found to be 864,845; or, within an eight-mile radius from St Paul's, 1,031,500.

These are the various estimates

and enumerations from the Restoration down to the beginning of this century. But a great part of the interest in the growth of London relates to the period before the Restoration, and it is

for the earlier period, especially were bills of mortality kept for a for London in the Tudor reigns, few weeks during the sweating that I have some evidence to sickness in the summer of 1551, bring forward, hitherto unpub- of which some figures are known; lished. The most important part but they are of no use for our of these new data is a series of purpose. The next occasion of tables among the papers of Lord weekly bills of mortality appears Burghley in the library of Hatfield to have been the disastrous plague House, which I have had leave of 1563. John Stow must have from the Marquis of Salisbury to had access to a complete series examine. They show the weekly of weekly bills for all the parishes christenings and the weekly burials within the walls, in the Liberties, (from plague and other causes) in and beyond the bars, from the London for a period of five years 12th of June 1563, when the from 1578 to 1582, and they are plague began, to the 26th of July complete, except for seven weeks 1566, when the weekly bills had at the end of 1581 and one week probably ceased to be kept. Alat the end of 1582. They are though one ought not to be unespecially trustworthy for reckon- gracious about anything that Stow ing the population from, as every has preserved for us, yet it is one was christened in church under tantalising to find that he had Elizabeth, and there were no Dis- extracted from these bills only senters' burial-grounds. The other the weekly burials from plague, original data are two very early while he might have obtained and hitherto unnoticed weekly from them also the weekly chrisbills of mortality, enumerating the tenings and the burials from causes deaths in the several parishes of other than plague; and as the the City and Liberties. The first epidemic virtually came to an end of these was lately purchased out in January 1564, we might have of the Egerton Fund for the had the births and deaths for two British Museum, and almost cer- years and a half of normal health tainly belongs to the earliest set of in London in the middle third of weekly bills, ordered by the Privy the sixteenth century. Stow's Council in 1532 during one of the figures, such as they are, have autumnal outbreaks of plague; been preserved, among other jotthe other is in the Record Office, tings by him, in the library at and certainly belongs to the second Lambeth, and have been printed set of weekly bills, which was by Mr Gairdner in one of the ordered by the Secretary of State Camden Society volumes (1880). (Cromwell) during the autumnal In his Annales' Stow gives the plague of 1535. Besides these total of deaths from plague and originals, with details for the sev- from other causes in 1563, diseral parishes, the totals of deaths tinguishing the share of the outfrom plague and from other causes parishes from that of the City and are known from letters of the time Liberties. The deaths from plague for two other weeks-one in the and from other causes, together first series of 1532, and the other with the christenings, are prein the second series of 1535. There served for a single week in the

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1 Egerton MS. 2603, folio 4. The date, "circa 1512," is given in the Catalogue of Additional MSS. as a conjecture, and is not maintained in view of the evidence which I adduce from the Calendar of State Papers.

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