8.The rate of mortality is low among ministers of religion and schoolmasters; among the agricultural classes, and in some other industries such as those of wheelwrights, shipwrights and coal miners.It is high in lead and tin mining, in file-making and earthenware manufacture.But neither these nor any other regular trade show as high a rate of mortality as is found among London general labourers and costermongers; while the highest of all is that of servants in inns.Such occupations are not directly injurious to health, but they attract those who are weak in physique and in character and they encourage irregular habits.Agood account of the influence of occupation on death-rates is given in the supplement to the forty-fifth (1885) Annual Report of the Registrar-General, pp.xxv-lxiii.See also Farr's Vital Statistics, pp.392-411, Humphreys' paper on Class Mortality Statistics in the Statistical Journal for June 1887, and the literature of the Factory Acts generally.
9.Davenant (Balance of Trade, A.D.1699, p.20), following Gregory King, proves that according to official figures London has an excess of deaths over births of 2000 a year, but an immigration of 5000; which is more than half of what he calculates, by a rather risky method, to be the true net increase of the population of the country.He reckons that 530,000 people live in London, 870,000 in the other cities and market towns, and 4,100,000 in villages and hamlets.Compare these figures with the census of 1901 for England and Wales; where we find London with a population of over 4,500,000; five more towns with an average of over 500,000; and sixty-nine more exceeding 50,000 with an average of over 100,000.Nor is this all: for many suburbs whose population is not counted in, are often really parts of the big towns; and in some cases the suburbs of several adjacent towns run into one another, making them all into one gigantic, though rather scattered town.A suburb of Manchester is counted as a large town with 220,000 inhabitants; and the same is true of West Ham, a suburb of London with 275,000.The boundaries of some large towns are extended at irregular intervals to include such suburbs: and consequently the true population of a large town may be growing fast, while its nominal population grows slowly or even recedes, and then suddenly leaps forwards.Thus the nominal population of Liverpool was 552,000 in 1881; 518,000 in 1891; and 685,000 in 1901.
Similar changes are taking place elsewhere.Thus the population of Paris has grown twelve times as fast during the nineteenth century as that of France.The towns of Germany are increasing at the expense of the country by one half per cent.of the population yearly.In the United States there was in 1800 no town with more than 75,000 inhabitants; in 1905 there were three which together contained more than 7,000,000 and eleven more with above 300,000 each.More than a third of the population of Victoria are collected in Melbourne.
