432.
** Strype, vol.iv.p.

221 *** Page 608.
**** Journ.

25 April 1621.
Harrison says, that in the musters taken in the years 1574 and 1575, the men fit for service amounted to one million one hundred and seventy-two thousand six hundred and seventy-four; yet was it believed that a full third was omitted.

Such uncertainty and contradiction are there in all these accounts.
Notwithstanding the greatness of this number, the same author complains much of the decay of populousness; a vulgar complaint in all places and all ages.

Guicciardini makes the inhabitants of England in this reign amount to two millions.
Whatever opinion we may form of the comparative populousness of England in different periods, it must be allowed that, abstracting from the national debt, there is a prodigious increase of power in that, more perhaps than in any other European state, since the beginning of the last century.