ABSTRACT
The problems of population, that is to say, the questions what it is that determines the size of human societies and what the consequences are that attend the increase or decrease in the number of a country's inhabitants, might well be the first to occur to a perfectly detached observer as soon as he looks at those societies in a spirit of scientific curiosity. The view that the key to historical processes is to be found in the variation of populations, though one-sided, is at least as reasonable as is any other theory of history that proceeds from the prejudice that there must be a single prime mover of social or economic evolution—such as technology, religion, race, class struggle, capital formation, and what not. Thus it is quite understandable that population problems should have received attention in the very beginnings of economic analysis; that they should have loomed large in the thought of all leading writers of the period under discussion; and that they should have been given a place of honor in the one great pre-Smithian system of economics that England produced, Sir James Steuart's Principles.
