bear potatoes; and Dr Adam Smith observes that if potatoes were
to become the favourite vegetable food of the common people, and
if the same quantity of land was employed in their culture as is
now employed in the culture of corn, the country would be able to
support a much greater population, and would consequently in a
very short time have it.

The happiness of a country does not depend, absolutely, upon
its poverty or its riches, upon its youth or its age, upon its
being thinly or fully inhabited, but upon the rapidity with which
it is increasing, upon the degree in which the yearly increase of
food approaches to the yearly increase of an unrestricted
population. This approximation is always the nearest in new
colonies, where the knowledge and industry of an old state
operate on the fertile unappropriated land of a new one. In other
cases, the youth or the age of a state is not in this respect of
very great importance. It is probable that the food of Great
Britain is divided in as great plenty to the inhabitants, at the
present period, as it was two thousand, three thousand, or four
thousand years ago. And there is reason to believe that the poor
and thinly inhabited tracts of the Scotch Highlands are as much
distressed by an overcharged population as the rich and populous
province of Flanders.

Were a country never to be overrun by a people more advanced
in arts, but left to its own natural progress in civilization;
from the time that its produce might be considered as an unit, to
the time that it might be considered as a million, during the
lapse of many hundred years, there would not be a single period
when the mass of the people could be said to be free from