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Cromwell Argus, Volume V, Issue 239, 9 June 1874, Page 6

Population of the British Empire. The population of the British Empire, including India and the Colonies, as well as the three kingdoms, is, at the present time, 234,000,000. The people included in this vast sum inhabit a territorial area of 7,769,449 square miles, upon which are 2,200 towns and villages, containing 44,142,851 houses or dwellings. Remarking upon these figures, the Timis says :—" In the palmiest days of Rome the Empire was numbered, imperfectly and loosely ; but Gibbon, no reckless computer, fixed the population of the Imperial Dominion, with its vast area of 1,600,000 square miles, at the moderate figure of 120,000,000." The British Empire is thus seven times as large as the old Roman Empire at its best, and contains thrice the number of its inhabitants. " The whole of this vast domain," says the same paper, "has been either settled or conquered by the English race, drawing strength and ardour from these little islands, which can now boast, after having peopled another hemisphere, of a population of their own numbering more than 31,000,000."