ABSTRACT
An increase in supply might arise from a fall in the cost of the labourers’ customary standard of living; this would both induce earlier marriage and therefore more births, and also allow the survival of an increased number of the children born. Adam Smith observed that, if the demand for labour were continually increasing, ‘the reward of labour must necessarily encourage in such a manner the marriage and multiplication of labourers, as may enable them to supply that continually increasing demand by a continually increasing population’. The fluctuations in the death rate, besides being more violent, appear often to have been the effective cause of the fluctuations in the birth rate; or, more properly, the fluctuations in the birth rate were often the response of society to the periods of high mortality caused by war, famine and disease. A period of high mortality tended also to have an effect on death rates in the period that followed.
