On the law issued in France to increase the population
Louis XIV granted pensions to those with ten children, and larger pensions for twelve. But the point was not to reward exceptional freaks of nature; to encourage a general desire to continue the species, it was necessary, following the Roman example, to establish rewards or penalties of general application.
How a population can be restored
If a state has been depopulated by such temporary circumstances as war, epidemic or famine, there are still remedies. Those who survive may retain their capacity for work and invention, and in their eagerness to erase the traces of disaster they may become even more skilled workers because of the very misfortune that befell them. But the evil is almost beyond cure when the loss of population appears as a chronic ailment, the result of some internal defect or bad government. In that case people perish from an unnoticed, habitual disease. Born into poverty and weakness, under the yoke of government violence and prejudice, they die, often without themselves understanding the causes of their destruction. Countries reduced to decline by despotism or by the excessive privileges of the clergy over the laity provide the two best examples of this.
It is useless, for the recovery of such a state, to wait for help from the children who may yet be born; the time for that has passed: a population surrounded by desert is stripped of energy and invention. On a stretch of land sufficient to feed a whole people, a single family can barely support itself. The common people cannot even make use of what their poverty creates, namely the wastelands that cover these countries. The clergy, the sovereign, the towns, the nobles and some of the most prominent citizens have gradually become owners of all the land. True, it lies uncultivated: the families that died out left it to them as pasture, while the worker has nothing.
In this situation, the whole territory of the country should do what the Romans did in one part of their state, and act amid a shortage of population as they acted amid abundance: that is, grant land to every family that has nothing, and give it the means to cultivate and sow it. This allotment should be made as applicants come forward, so that not a single minute is lost to work.
(from Montesquieu’s book “The Spirit of the Laws”. Montesquieu was a French writer, jurist and philosopher of the Enlightenment. He developed the doctrine of the separation of powers, which holds that state power should be distributed among branches that are independent of one another yet balance and check each other: the legislative, the executive and the judicial. He lived from 1689 to 1755.)