386 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

technological revolution in industry, as the nineteenth-century creation
of the 'clipper* sailing-ship ran neck and neck with the nineteenth-
century creation of the steamship. If, in spite of this sudden spurt of
progress, agriculture nevertheless failed to maintain its age-old primacy
over industry in a Western and a Westernizing World, the reason was
that the eighteenth-century agricultural revolution, by itself, would have
been no adequate response—even in combination with the accompany-
ing extension of the acreage under cultivation in Western Europe as well
as overseas—to the Malthusian challenge which the eighteenth-century
industrial revolution did prove able to meet.

The formidably steep and rapid increase in population, which declared
itself in Great Britain first among the countries of the Modern Western
World, seems to have been due to a reduction of the death-rate, thanks
to an improvement in the standard of public health,1 which was not
offset by any countervailing fall in the birth-rate for the next five or six
generations. In Great Britain the fall in the death-rate began to make
itself felt circa A.D. 1740 ;2 'between 1740 and 1820 the death-rate fell
almost continuously, from an estimated 35-8 for the ten years ending in
1740 to one of 21 -i for those ending in 1821' ;3 but net rates of reproduc-
tion did not begin to fall off in either Great Britain or France before
A.D. 1875-80, and not in other West European countries before A.D.
1905-1 o.4 The net increase in the population of Western Europe through
this Time-lag between the fall in the death-rate and the fall in the birth-
rate was to reach its peak in A.D. 1890—i9io.s By the time of writing of
the book, published in A.D. 1947, in which these remarkable figures are
presented, the average expectation of life in the Western World had
risen from the span of thirty-five years, at which it had stood under the
ancien regime, to a span of no less than sixty.6

This great spurt in the growth of population, first in Great Britain
and then in other provinces of a Western and a Westernizing World,
would have been an economic liability if the explosion of the Industrial
Revolution had not responded to the challenge by converting this
potential liability into an asset. The Industrial Revolution enabled an
increasing population actually to raise its standard of living through a
concomitant increase in the volume of economic production that more
than kept pace with the increase in the number of mouths to be fed and
bodies to be clothed and housed; and our familiarity with this achieve-
ment must not blind us to the truth that it was an amazing tour defvrce,

'The spectre of the pressure of population on the means of subsistence
which oppressed the mind of Malthus in 1798 was no chimaera. . . . An
increase of people . .. does not necessarily mean either a greater effective
demand for manufactured goods or an increased production of these in

1 As many as ten distinct influences operating in Great Britain, from about A.p. 1740
onwards, to reduce the incidence of death are enumerated by T. S. Ashton in The
Industrial Revolution, 1760—1830 (London 1948, Oxford University Press), p. 4.

a- See Dupriez, L/. H.: Les Mouvements J-Sconomiques G&n&raux (Louvain 1947, Institut
de Recherches Economiques et Sociales, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 304.

3 Ashton, T. S.: The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 (London 1948, Oxford Uni-
versity Press), p. 4.

* See Dupriez, op, cit, voL i, p. 306.

s See ibid., vol. i, p. 303. 6 See ibid., vol. i, p. 304.