The population of the commonwealth in 1774 had become fully four millions. The immigration, by the immense expenditures of Ralph Morton, had been such as the world had never seen elsewhere. The circumstances of life were so favorable that the natural increase of the colony, by the excess of births over deaths, was sufficient to double the population every thirty years or less, exclusive of immigration. The suppression of the smallpox by vaccination was sufficient of itself to give the commonwealth an immense advantage over other countries.
The population of other English colonies, exclusive of Canada, was a little less than two and a half millions. Aristopia had doubtless drawn off some people who, but for her, would have gone to the Atlantic colonies; but most of her immigrants were those who would never have reached America without her aid: the Irish; the poor peasants of England, Scotland, and the western shores of the continent; the people of the far inland regions, eastern Germany, Bohemia, Poland, Austria, Switzerland, Savoy, Lombardy, and Venice, who would not have come to America but for the far-reaching and effective Morton agencies.
Aristopia, for convenience of administration
