"The old order changeth, yielding place to the new,
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."

Our duty is, instead of longing for the good old custom, to take care of
the good new custom, lest it should corrupt the world in like wise. And
it may do so thus:--

The rapid increase of population during the first half of this century
began at a moment when the British stock was specially exhausted; namely,
about the end of the long French war. There may have been periods of
exhaustion, at least in England, before that. There may have been one
here, as there seems to have been on the Continent, after the Crusades;
and another after the Wars of the Roses. There was certainly a period of
severe exhaustion at the end of Elizabeth's reign, due both to the long
Spanish and Irish wars and to the terrible endemics introduced from
abroad; an exhaustion which may have caused, in part, the national
weakness which hung upon us during the reign of the Stuarts. But after
none of these did the survival of the less fit suddenly become more easy;
or the discovery of steam power, and the acquisition of a colonial
empire, create at once a fresh demand for human beings and a fresh supply
of food for them. Britain, at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
was in an altogether new social situation.

At the beginning of the great French war; and, indeed, ever since the
beginning of the war with Spain in 1739--often snubbed as the "war about
Jenkins's ear"--but which was, as I hold, one of the most just, as it was
one of the most popular, of all our wars; after, too, the once famous
"forty fine harvests" of the eighteenth century, the British people, from
the gentleman who led to the soldier or sailor who followed, were one of