The French death-rate seems to have fallen from 39 to 29 between ...

The French death-rate seems to have fallen from 39 to 29 between 1780 and 1820. This in London over all: The infantile mortality about a 840 was-upper classes 1/50; middle classes 1/6; lower classes 1/4. In Manchester and Leeds the mortality under 6 was about 1/100. Down to the French wars England had been on balance a wheat-exporting country. After Waterloo it was plain that the balance had been reversed and that foreign wheat, though there were still years when the import only amounted to a few days' consumption, was normally required to make good the English harvest.

The sliding scale was contrived to steady home prices, and therefore rents, while admitting foreign supplies as they were needed: in theory the Radicals preferred Free Trade, in theory the Whigs were for a fixed duty; but in the early thirties the issue was not raised, the schism between the advertisement and landed interests was latent and speculative. Empire ruled from Australia.

But the English of 1830, with six generations of the Law of Settlement behind them, were not easily up-rooted, and, publicly, the only restraint that could be recommended was late marriage and the abolition of those provisions of the Poor Law which set a premium on reckless unions. There was much active, if furtive, discussion of birth-control in Radical circles: John Mill was once in trouble for poking pamphlets down area railings; and one writer proposed that instruction in the subject should be included in the rules of all Trade Unions But contraception did not seriously affect the birth-rate until, in the seventies, it returned from America, to which it had

been carried by the younger Owen.