“The first resource of savage life is in the flesh of wild animals. Hence the numbers amongst savage nations, compared with the tract of country which they occupy, are universally small, because this species of provision is, of all others, supplied in the slenderest proportion. The next step was the invention of pasturage, or the rearing of flocks and herds of tame animals. This alteration added to the stock of provision much. But the last and _principal improvement was to follow, viz., tillage, or the artificial production of corn, esculent plants, and roots_. This discovery, whilst it changed the quality of human food, augmented the quantity in a vast proportion.
“So far as the state of population is governed and limited by the quantity of provision, perhaps there is no single cause that affects it so powerfully as the kind and quality of food which chance or usage hath introduced into a country. In England, notwithstanding the produce of the soil has been of late considerably increased by the enclosure of wastes and the adoption, in many places, of a more successful husbandry, yet we do not observe a corresponding addition to the number of inhabitants, the reason of which appears to me to be the more general consumption of animal food amongst us. Many ranks of people whose ordinary diet was, in the last century, prepared almost entirely from milk, roots, and vegetables, now require every day a considerable portion of the flesh of animals. _Hence a great part of the richest lands of the country are converted to pasturage._ Much also of the bread-corn, which went directly to the nourishment of human bodies, now only contributes to it by fattening the flesh of sheep and oxen. _The mass and volume of provisions are hereby diminished_, and what is gained in the amelioration of the soil is lost in the quality of the produce.
“This consideration teaches us that tillage, as an object of national care and encouragement, is universally preferable to pasturage, because the kind of provision which it yields goes much farther in the sustentation of human life. Tillage is also recommended by this additional advantage--that it _affords employment to a much more numerous peasantry_. Indeed pasturage seems to be the art of a nation, either imperfectly civilised, as are many of the tribes which cultivate it in the internal parts of Asia, or of a nation, like Spain, declining from its summit by luxury and inactivity.”[192]