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excess of births over deaths, and none of the years was a plague season of the severer degree, yet the births for the whole period were 33 per cent short of the deaths. On the other hand, in the nine nonplague years (so far as is known), from 1584 to 1592, the excess of births over deaths would have been about one-fourth, according to the known precedent of 1580. Thus it becomes easy to understand how the figures for the years 1593-95 should show a population increased by some 30,000 from the year 1580. In like manner the eight years from 1595 to 1602 were, so far as is known, free from plague in London (although by no means free from it in the provinces); so that, despite an enormous plague mortality in 1603 itself, the births in 1605, when they had recovered from the disturbing in fluence of the great plague, show a population again increased to 224,275. Thus the population of London, which we estimate at 93,276 in the sixth year of Elizabeth, would have more than doubled before the end of her reign, standing at 224,275 in the third year of James I. The reign of James is known from various sources to have been a period of expansion, both westwards along the Strand and eastwards in the great parish of Stepney. The christenings in 1622, according to the old rate of 29 per 1000 living, would give a population of 272,207. Although the population was seriously reduced by the disastrous plague in 1625, as severe relatively as the Great Plague of 1665 itself, the births in the year 1634 have reached the total of 9855, corresponding to a population of 339,824. During the troubled period of the Parliamentary wars the returns of the parish clerks are obviously defective, the births in particular

being year after year far below the totals of 1634 and 1635. I shall not venture on an estimate for the years between that and the Restoration, but simply copy the contemporary estimate of Graunt for the year 1661-namely, 460,000, of which one-fifth was in the City within the walls, onefifth in the larger out-parishes of Lambeth, Newington, Redriff, Stepney, Hackney, Islington, and Westminster, and the other threefifths in Southwark, the Liberties, and the parishes next to the Liberties.

Throwing these estimates for various periods in the history of London into the form of a table, we may represent the growth of population as follows:

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Sir William Petty, writing in 1683, thought that he had discovered by a study of the burials since the time when they began to be regularly kept in 1604, and by taking the burials in the year 1565 at 2568 (without saying why), the law of increase for the London population. Since 1565, he concluded, the deaths had regularly doubled in forty years. Starting from the end of a forty years' period in his own time-the year 1682-he projected his series into the future, and came to the result that London, in the year 1802, would have 178,648 burials, and a corresponding population of 5,359,440. This shows the danger of riding off on the back of a

numerical series. The burials recorded for 1802 were only 19,379, to which a few thousands would have to be added for omissions; and the census of the year before (1801) gave a population of 864,845. The fact was that the increase of London, which had gone on steadily since the earlier Tudor reigns, was checked throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century. For some years-about 1740 -the population is supposed by some to have gone back. The advance of some 200,000 beyond the estimated population of 1699, which the census of 1801 showed, had probably been made in great part after 1790, when the health of the capital began to improve, and the births again to exceed the deaths, as they were wont to do in the intervals between plagueyears under the Tudors. The eighteenth century was one of the most unwholesome periods in the whole history of England, and of London in particular. There was no more plague after the autumn of 1666; but typhus fever, which had been the companion and congener of plague throughout the Stuart period, came to the front when the other infection was exhausted by the epidemic of 1665, and in its steady prevalence from year to year proved as disastrous to the population of London as the occasional terrific outbursts of plague, which had come at long intervals, and cut off at one stroke the ever-growing fringe of poverty and broken fortunes. Typhus was at the same time aided by smallpox, depending as the latter did upon similar conditions, and by other forms of infection; so that the mortality was, year by year, until 1790, in excess of the births. The population was kept up and slightly increased by influx from the country. But London, with

a population of some 700,000, had become as big as it could well be, with no better means of moving about than people had in the eighteenth century. The population was nearly stationary, and so also were the people in their houses, shops, lanes, and streets. When John Gilpin rode to Edmonton (and farther) he had not had a holiday (at least in his wife's company) for twice ten tedious years; and it is not likely that he had been far beyond the sound of Bow Bells all that time. Cobbett, speaking of his life as a lawyer's clerk in Gray's Inn about 1783, says: "I never quitted this gloomy recess except on Sundays, when I usually took a walk in St James's Park." A writer on London fevers in the year 1734, Dr Browne Langrish, F.R.S., gives a curious illustration of how they were produced, although he does not name the locality, and would probably have been at a loss to prove such a state of matters even for the courts or rents" of Holborn or Saffron Hill, Drury Lane, or Clare Market : "And less than 3000 human creatures within the compass of an acre of ground would make an atmosphere of their own steams about 71 feet high in thirty-four days; which, if not carried away by winds, would turn pestiferous in a moment,—from whence we may infer that living in great and populous cities. may dispose to putrid, malignant fevers." It was not until about the year 1790 that London began to break through the limits which it had reached at the beginning of that century. Its numbers a century ago are now increased five or six times; but that could never have been had not its area been increased by much more than five or six times.

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C. CREIGHTON.

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POLITICS IN FICTION.

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POLITICS naturally play an important part in the fiction of a nation, where they are the common talk of all the world, from the prince on the steps of the throne to the cottager smoking in the alehouse. Everybody is supposed to be thoroughly at home in them, and Wilkie, in the solemn earnestness of his "Village Politicians," went to the very root of the matter. In a country which has boasted of its free institutions since the Witenagemot of the Saxons, a public career is open to all comers, and the gifted son of a scavenger may aspire theoretically to direct the destinies of the British empire. Indeed, stranger things are likely to happen in these days of school boards with the advent of free education. in writing of politics in fiction, we are less concerned with the possibilities of the future than with the picturesqueness of the past. We are sorry to think that, from the more sensational point of view, the prosaic has been replacing the romantic. Our older novelists had grand opportunities, and, happily for historians, they did not neglect them. Great statesmen, when platform oratory was less common, and when the practice of reporting was comparatively in its infancy, made novels the channels for communicating their thoughts, and discussing the condition of the country and the masses. In their fiction they followed the course of the thrilling political struggles which had enfranchised the democracy for good or for evil, and carried a succession of bills for " giving everything to everybody." Those statesmen, if they wrote as partisans, wrote in the ripe matur

ity of habitual reflection, and founded the scenes, which were brightened and coloured by imagination, on personal experiences and reminiscences. Nor in their brilliant books, as in many others, was the popular and dramatic side of politics neglected. They analysed the ambition which burned as a fever, making men hazard everything on the hope of distinction, compromising with conscience and throwing principle overboard. They dwelt on the careers of youths who dreamed of being the disinterested benefactors of the human race; who fondly fancied they might regenerate and revolutionise, and who subsequently either came to signal grief or settled down into steady-going, practical men of business. Those good old days were the days of fiercely contested elections, fought out regardless of expense and law, in contempt of peace, purity, and public order. It was then that Brougham, though but a rising lawyer, somehow found vast sums of money to fling to the winds in battling in Cumberland against the Lowthers. It was then that three great Yorkshire families must have hopelessly embarrassed themselves in a triangular duel, had they not had inexhaustible mines beneath boundless acres. It was then Earl Spencer is said to have spent £150,000 on what is known as the "spendthrift election." Those were the days of the rotten boroughs, when each marketable borough went to the highest bidder; when a Sir Pitt Crawley kept one seat for himself, selling the other to a nabob or a Government nominee; when a man might qualify his bailiff and his butler to return a

couple of millionaires to represent them in Parliament; and when less strictly limited electorates in the south-western counties looked to clear a few hundreds per head at each welcome dissolution. Those were the days when there was no sneaking nomination by signed papers within doors. The hustings were set up in the market-place in good old constitutional fashion, and the candidate had to stand forward and talk if he could, or in any case to pose as a cockshy. Business first, pleasure afterwards. For days before, the free and independent electors had been making their bargain; the "men in the moon" had been shuffling and dealing handfuls of banknotes in the back parlours of the public - houses, and the taps of liquor had been set running in the bars. Any dissolute rascal with a vote, or the possibility of influencing a vote, might count upon a retainer with nothing to do. The spirits of philanthropy and geniality reigned supreme; the women were kissed and the children petted, the men were kept in a chronic state of intoxication. In short, the business being transacted with infinite joviality, the electorate was wound up to a proper pitch of excitement for the grand carnival of the nomination. It was then that the unfortunate non-electors had their chance of showing their interest in public affairs. The candidates were simultaneously proposed and pilloried. They showed their dexterity in dodging dead cats and dogs; they had often to protect themselves with stout umbrellas against welldirected volleys of apples and rotten eggs. Nor was the declaration of the poll by any means decisive. There had generally been an abundance of bribery and corruption, and it was only a ques

tion of proving personal guilt or agency. If a sufficiency of evidence and money were forthcoming, the petition followed in due course, and the electioneering campaign was shifted to Westminster, to be fought out before a parliamentary committee; the scenes changed, but the same influences were still at work. There are parliamentary agents with carte blanche for their bills; there are silver-tongued counsel with fabulous fees on their briefs; there are subsidiary agents akin to the men in the moon, trying all they know to "earwig" the hostile witnesses, who are jealously guarded while they live like fighting cocks on the luxuries of the metropolis. All that, and much more of the kind, is embodied in the fiction by our best and most brilliant novelists.

The fathers of English fiction have little to say about politics. In Fielding we find casual allusions to Knights of the Shires; and Smollett talks suggestively of Roderick Random dancing attendance upon patrons and peers that he may obtain a surgeon's berth in the navy. Everything then, like kissing, went by favour. A vote meant something substantial, and the control of a section of voters a great deal more. There is a good story told of a Cambridge divine who preached before the elder Pitt, when the all-powerful Minister paid a visit to the university. The preacher is said to have taken for his text, "There is a lad among us with some barley loaves, and a few small fishes: but what are they among so many?" The sarcastic clergyman sent the shaft home. Every man with patronage, or with the means of influencing it, was hunted by packs of hungry expectants. It was a case of every one for himself; and

there seemed to be no such thing as disinterested patriotism. The Prime Minister was beset by noble and greedy borough-mongers. Lord North complains bitterly in his confidential letters of the hard bargain driven by Lord Falmouth for the sale, or rather the lease, of some Cornish seats. Yet seats must be secured if the Ministry were to stand. Lord Marney in 'Sybil' is refused a dukedom by the Whig oligarchs. He renounces his principles, counts his boroughs, consults his cousins, waits for an opportunity, and takes a signal revenge. Lucrative posts closed the mouths of dangerous aspirants to the leadership of the House. So Macaulay tells how the avarice of the elder Fox was gratified with the Paymastership of the Admiralty, which meant, in other words, that his accounts were to be passed, while he put the country to pillage. A corrupt chief was bound to connive at the malversations and peculations of his subordinates. Contracts were given away to the most influential bidders, and the men whose duty it was to check the quality of the Government stores drew commissions as sleeping partners of swindlers. Perhaps Britain was in some measure indebted for her naval victories to the inferior quality of the powder, for the bite of her bulldogs was more dangerous than their bark, and they had learned to rely on the boarding-pike and cutlass. On the other hand, the maggoty beef and the weevily biscuit often brought the seamen to mutiny, or the verge of it; they died of the scurvy on the foreign stations like rotten sheep, or were sent to hospitals to be tended by unskilful surgeons and dosed with adulterated drugs. Smollett gives a terrible picture of the sufferings

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of the expedition to Carthagena; and even in the later days which Marryat has dramatised, things had not greatly changed for the better. The most responsible posts were often filled by the most incompetent men. The flagrant abuses could not have been tolerated had the light of parliamentary committees been flashed upon them; but the conspiracy of silence was too strong for protest. The long-descended democrat in 'Sybil' speaks bitterly of the younger branches of the aristocracy being provided for, as "colonels without regiments, and as housekeepers of royal palaces which had ceased to exist." system of sinecures was in full swing, and the nation was saddled with the payment of hereditary pensions. There were Clerks of the Rolls, Clerks of the Stoles, Clerks of anything and everything, drawing handsome salaries for the non-discharge of long - neglected duties or ceremonies. Disraeli's Marquis of Deloraine, a peer who lived like a prince, derived the better part of his ample income from the pension transmitted to him by his grandfather the Chancellor. Even when Trollope wrote his Can You Forgive Her?' Mr Vavasor earned several hundreds per annum by signing a few documents quarterly. A similar system pervaded the whole public service. The winning member at an election had accepted promissory bills at discretion, which were sometimes met under force of pressure, though far more often inevitably dishonoured. All public places, down to those of excisemen, tide - waiters, and messengers at public offices, were filled by favour. It was a misfortune, perhaps, that the appointments were permanent, and that, according to the constitutional arrangements of our Amer

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