Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/26

Britain second, while in point of population it easily heads the list.

It must appear singular to some readers, that after so many years of tolerably close intercourse between China and Western countries there should still be so much uncertainty about her population. But strangers are obviously incompetent to form any trustworthy estimate in the case of an empire so vast and so little accessible, while the Chinese themselves have never taken a census for its own sake. Their unique object in conducting such investigations has always been to determine the number of taxable units, and in view of that purpose the people, on their side, have naturally shown a disposition to evade enumeration. The history of the Empire records that in the ninth century before Christ, the population of China proper aggregated about twenty-two millions, and that the figure at the beginning of the Christian era was eighty millions. Thereafter great variations appear in the returns; variations which, though partially attributable to changes in the areas affected, and partially to the inclusion at one time of elements excluded at another, are still so marked as to be bewildering. Thus the eighty millions of the days of Christ fall to twenty-three millions three centuries subsequently; rise to forty-six millions after the lapse of a similar period; become 100 millions at the beginning of the twelfth century; fall again to fifty-nine millions at the end of the